I’ve seen more informative reporting from 404 media and others, Signal had more or less said they can’t guarantee security for third party apps. Which makes sense, I can’t guarantee a house I didn’t build is safe. The OP link also talks about how the hacked company is Oregon based, which is technically true that they’re registered there. But the reporting I had read indicated the company was founded and is run by a former Israeli security officer, and has offices in Israel.

Yes, that’s kind of what I was getting at - having this cloud browser thing would be significantly worse for privacy than even a smart phone.

Setting aside the financial management of the church, it’s one of the largest organizations in the world which tells people what the purpose of life is. Its members believe the person they’re selecting has authority from God to say what actions are right and wrong.

While I don’t personally believe that, hard not to see it’s a position of significant power and people have an interest in knowing or influencing the outcome.

Can you share what your reasons are for considering a dumb phone?

For me I’m probably not actually going to get one, but have idly thought about it. If I were to get one it would be to free me from the attention sink of web browsing and apps. So I don’t find it appealing to consider a dumb phone that still has web browsing but using some sort of work around.

Sure, we’re in agreement as far as that goes. My point was just the commenter above me was indicating it should be common knowledge that Tesla self driving hits motorcycles more than other self driving cars. And whether their comment was about this or some other subject, I think it’s counterproductive to be like “everyone knows that.”

It’s helpful to remember that not everyone has seen the same stories you have. If we want something to change, like regulators not allowing dangerous products, then raising public awareness is important. Expressing surprise that not everyone knows about something can be counterproductive.

Going beyond that, wouldn’t the new information here be the statistics?

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to argue centralization is a naturally occurring phenomenon. It’s everywhere. The U.S. left Afghanistan and was replaced by a different centralized entity. One could argue how decentralized those “tribes” were, but regardless, after the U.S. departure they recreated a similar structure.

Complexity comes hand in hand with size. The OP is a chart of the different email providers. Can an individual run their own email server? Yes. And doesn’t it get more difficult after a certain number of users and require hiring specialists? Yes. But still, such large services exist, and a majority of users turn to them.

If the fediverse lives there will always be small servers, but we can expect to see really big ones. If we don’t want them to be corporate recreations of gmail and yahoo and hotmail I’d argue we should figure out a platform co-op/worker co-op model, including the necessary funding and specialists.

My argument isn’t about the fediverse specifically. It’s that centralization is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and the lack of friction resulting from centralization can make it more competitive.

What is the reason the cost per user of hosting a Lemmy server goes up after a few thousand users? If it were say, you need more expensive hardware, that doesn’t necessarily disprove my argument. Just because a bigger investment is needed doesn’t mean it’s not cheaper per user or not more competitive. Just that you or I don’t have the capital, or that we might see centralization bad because we have bad experiences with centralized entities.

Also just because something is more competitive doesn’t mean it’s morally or aesthetically more desirable. The specialized army fed and trained by an empire overruns the brave and happy tribe of hunter gatherers.

What I’m saying is since we know the phenomenon of centralization occurs, we should try to subvert it as much as possible by introducing democratic structures.

We should have large semi-centralized services. But they should be democratically controlled.

Do you ever think about why cities form? Rural life has a lot of appealing characteristics, plus it’s the starting state of the world. Cities form because there is an advantage to size, proximity and specialization. If we had a new planet and completely evenly distributed the population across its land, we’d very quickly form cities regardless.

It’s the same with centralized services. It takes a lot of special knowledge and equipment to run an email service. The average Lemmy user may have those resources, but even here, how many of us run our own email servers?

It costs less per person in resources to add more users after the first one. So there’s an incentive to aggregate users together. And once you have a certain number of users, maybe you figure out some way to fund your operation, and you can pay more people to add features/capabilities. Soon your entity not only has more users, it’s more appealing than a plan vanilla email service, and you get even more users. You’re doing it cheaper and better than the DIYers.

I think centralization and size are naturally occurring. We should think about ways to exist and benefit from them, so something like Gmail but run as a worker cooperative.

The linked post goes into detail about why the author views Kagi as not privacy oriented, and that in the author’s opinion Kagi is overly focused on AI. (And was originally started as an AI company)