Telegram is about to be blocked here in Brazil
reuters.com
reuters.com
"It seems that we had an issue with emails going between our telegram.org corporate addresses and the Brazilian Supreme Court. As a result of this miscommunication, the Court ruled to ban Telegram for being unresponsive.
On behalf of our team, I apologize to the Brazilian Supreme Court for our negligence. We definitely could have done a better job.
We complied with an earlier court decision in late February and responded with a suggestion to send future takedown requests to a dedicated email address. Unfortunately, our response must have been lost, because the Court used the old general-purpose email address in further attempts to reach us. As a result, we missed its decision in early March that contained a follow-up takedown request. Luckily, we have now found and processed it, delivering another report to the Court today.
Because tens of millions of Brazilians rely on Telegram to communicate with family, friends and colleagues, I ask the Court to consider delaying its ruling for a few days at its discretion to allow us to remedy the situation by appointing a representative in Brazil and setting up a framework to react to future pressing issues like this in an expedited manner.
The last 3 weeks have been unprecedented for the world and for Telegram. Our content moderation team was flooded with requests from multiple parties. However, I am certain that once a reliable channel of communication is established, we'll be able to efficiently process takedown requests for public channels that are illegal in Brazil."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia
https://meduza.io/en/cards/russia-is-trying-to-block-telegra...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-telegram-ban-idUSK...
What is really happening? This is as _ad hominem_ as it can get. Boo! Bolsonaro uses it, so block it. So maybe this is an oversimplification of the real reason. Anyway, I don't get it.
They are being blocked for not responding to court orders.
There is still only one implementation of the Matrix homeserver protocol. Just one.
But hey, at least we have built-in VOIP and color unicode emojiis. You couldn't possibly have a successor to IRC without features like those. Glad the Matrix folks have their priorities straight.
The world has already tried decentralization without putting the average user's needs and wants first, it's called XMPP and it's there for you to use and call the echo server, if there even is one to respond. Matrix has a long way to go, but at least it hasn't given up before it started.
Our project https://snikket.org/ is using XMPP and has all the features you listed. My 85yo grandmother does in fact use it to video call her grandson, regularly :)
https://joinjabber.org/ has a handful of recommendations, and if you're curious about features supported by a specific server, check out https://compliance.conversations.im/ to view that information.
I can't speak for the backend, because I've never hosted a server myself, but I find the good XMPP clients to have many more features and to be much more performant than the good Matrix ones.
What a time to be alive.
Honestly to me this is less dystopian than having unaccountable business wholesale ignore the laws of a nation state, which Telegram seems to do just about anywhere. Not sure since when literally following the law qualified as authoritarianism.
Freedom of speech is important, even if it enables a-holes as a side effect.
Furthermore, this seems like a classic case of political warfare where a company is dragged into the politicians' squabbles and is forced to pick a side. It's an impossible situation for any company involved and we already know even Facebook and Google and Apple gave in.
The "legal court orders" are super easy to craft when you're ruling the country so don't give me that, it's not a good argument at all. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden were also "legally" persecuted. Or will you now say they shouldn't have done what they did?
many things are important and all of them have in common that they find their limits within the bounds of the law. Brazil has a different take on freedom of speech than the US. You can argue about the details of this particular case of course and whether it's politized or not, but it isn't authoritarian at all to demand that tat a tech company acts within regulations. A Russian dude running a company out of Dubai by American speech standards is a nice cosmopolitan tale but has little relevance in Brazil.
>Or will you now say they shouldn't have done what they did?
Yes I think they should not have done what they did, or slightly more nuanced, if they thought it was ethical to do what they did, they should have accepted the punishment. Assange's wholesale dump in particular was damaging not just to US national security but also civilians who assisted American forces and whose identity was exposed, but that's another discussion.
Whether something is dystopian or not is unrelated to whether it's legal. Dystopia is always legal, that's the point of it.
At least that's how that Harvard kid was "caught" [0]
That's why it is a problem. Messaging apps are for messaging people