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Comment by pancsta | Hacker News Reader

Everyone should be selfhosting a matrix server, with a guest web inbox. Then, some ppl may connect into networks if they want. Lets not forget that Signal is also a for-profit company. IMs should be like DNS, email, or IRC.

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Didn't we go through this before with PGP-encrypted emails? 90+% of users are not technically competent enough to even understand, in the vaguest of terms, what you are saying. Even fewer have the time, ability and resources to do so.

Long ago this was an issue. Now with Thunderbird people can trivially PGP encrypt the body of their emails. With IRC this is done with OTR e.g. irssi-otr. I've manage to get lawyers and family members to use PGP so it can't be that hard.

Ask a teenager what a folder is. There's a good chance they'll not know what you are talking about. They can use apps and that's about it. Thunderbird? Good luck with that.

I hear you. It's about incentives. Any time a teenager can learn a method to get around content restrictions will will become a tool in their toolbox. They might reach for the Discord tool by default but when that is compromised such as recent events and governments start looking into all the DM's and voice-to-text transcripts they may reach for that old tool to prove they can not be censored or monitored. I would not expect teenagers to use it otherwise.

> Lets not forget that Signal is also a for-profit company.

Source? Last time I checked it was a non-profit. But that's not the point. The point is that the Signal app is open source, so you can check what it does.

Matrix is inferior to Signal.

Every company is for profit. OpenAI was a “non-profit”. “Worse” and “good enough” can be true at the same time. Selfhosting signal is inferior to selfhosting matrix [0].

[0] https://softwaremill.com/can-you-self-host-the-signal-server...

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