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Comment by sdiacom | Hacker News Reader

I may be irony-poisoned beyond repair, but I genuinely can't tell if this comment is intentionally a parody of a Hacker News comment.

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The post, and famous top comment from BrandonM, for the curious:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Oh, you're poisoned. There's something shady about all these new "chat clients" that require so much personal crap. I tend to prefer software that allows you to host your own server - Jitsi and Jitsi Meet allow that. Jitsi has ZRTP encryption and Jitsi Meet uses WebRTC for end-to-end encryption, but I like that even if you don't want to host it yourself, you can still use it without software/logins here on their official site:

https://meet.jit.si/

Just type in any name you want, give the link to a friend and bam.

I very much doubt you could use this with an average set of friends and family no matter how hard you try. You're going to lose touch with at least half if you insist that Jitsi is the only replacement you have to offer people for a chat application and you don't reach out to them using something they can read like email or snail mail or dropping by if you live close enough. (That's why I think GP took your post for potential irony.) Kudos to you if it works for you, but it's not a serious option.

I don't have a Facebook messenger and believe me that's bad enough without also ditching Signal because eww phone number, Threema because eww nonanonymous payments, Telegram because eww no encryption, Element because it's unstable and I don't think my mom (let alone my grandma) would be able to use that UI effectively, Briar which can fundamentally not support voice calls, Jaimi which is about as stable as Windows 95 at launch when I tried it (and this wasn't an early beta, it was called Ring before iirc, it's gone through years of development), Wire which runs on USA infrastructure and isn't focusing on consumers anymore, et cetera and so on and so forth. I've actually got most of these apps and it's already hard to find common grounds when literally everyone else has Facebook's WhatsApp and they're wondering why I'm being difficult if they're not techies or privacy nuts themselves.

So people can't bookmark websites anymore? They need a stupid APP? What are they doing on the internet exactly?

I'd rather have nothing to do with weirdos who require an "app" to communicate, and I say that having been using voice chat online since Iparty. (1997)

Iparty. Battlecom. Roger Wilco. Ventrilo. Teamspeak. Skype. Mumble. Discord etc

Until recently, you could host your own server on most of these. I want to go back to that. I'm sick of relying on other people for things to be up. Jitsi Meet is great.

To the second question, how's that different from a desktop "app" that you use to run Jitsi? The server "app" that you use to run the server?

Also I suspect you're trolling everyone.

Nobody ever calls me a troll in voice -- only text. Funny how that works.

I don't think many people troll in voice, either, so then it doesn't make sense to say that. But this is getting quite meta. Point was that your claimed opinion is so far out there compared to typical life that I don't know if you're serious about not installing any apps for legitimate and useful purposes ever.

no sim signup? What in the fuck is that? Don't you see the way the internet is going lately?

Do you need to give a phone number or even email address to get on IRC? No. What about Ventrilo, Mumble, or Teamspeak? No. What about Skype? Yeah. Email.

Email is about as far as I go. If they want more than that (phone number etc) they can fuck off. How is that out of the ordinary? Because I'm not a cell phone newbie to the internet? I've been here for a long time and the personal information demands from all these piece of shit "services" are egregious when we have open source and self-hostable options that STILL WORK.

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