this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
221 points (97.8% liked)
Privacy
3398 readers
400 users here now
Welcome! This is a community for all those who are interested in protecting their privacy.
Rules
PS: Don't be a smartass and try to game the system, we'll know if you're breaking the rules when we see it!
- Be civil and no prejudice
- Don't promote big-tech software
- No apathy and defeatism for privacy (i.e. "They already have my data, why bother?")
- No reposting of news that was already posted
- No crypto, blockchain, NFTs
- No Xitter links (if absolutely necessary, use xcancel)
Related communities:
Some of these are only vaguely related, but great communities.
- !opensource@programming.dev
- !selfhosting@slrpnk.net / !selfhosted@lemmy.world
- !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !drm@lemmy.dbzer0.com
founded 8 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It’s centralized but I consider it the baseline for privacy.
You are definitely right but it's probably almost right at the sweet spot. Decentralization/federation is great for privacy, but think about what most non-technical people can handle. With federation alone, practically all non-tech people would even fail (or be confused by) the first step, namely to find an instance.
So are there more privacy friendly options than Signal? Definitely. But are those user friendly enough most people could use it? I can't think of one, but would live to hear some alternatives that are simple enough my mom could use it.
I mean, people understand mails alright, which is fairly similar to the fediverde. They get very enthousiastic about AI and don't know anything about how it works.
But to be fair Mail is pretty centralized too nowadays for most people @gmail and @outlook. Of course there are others but my point is that there a a hand full of providers up to a point that it's almost unfeasible to maintain and run you own mailserver because there is a high chance that those large providers will flag your mail as spam because it's rare to see a "wild" mailserver.