1k or 2k? Lol, my debit cards only have $20 at a time on them at max.

Haven’t tried Snikket, but tried the software it is based on (Prosody). Works very well and is easy to set up, and heard good things about Snikket! If you go through - good luck with it)

Passive data collection is an issue for me even though I am also not important. I do use Signal, but only with my true identity and with a few people I know from real life. When it comes to purely online communities, I compartmentalize my identities.

If it’s a personal server, XMPP actually pretty botherless) Matrix did randomly break for me, though.

The clients I tried for Matrix had similar trouble with multiacc, yeah. However, my XMPP clients do have a tab with accounts you can toggle on and off.

Yeah! One of my issues with Signal is how clunky it is to have several profiles - something I cannot imagine living without. Not only would you need separate phone numbers, but you’d also need separate clients (or separate profiles with the same app on mobile, or different users on desktop).

And where I am at, Telegram is just the main social network nowadays. VKontakte became unusable garbage even for an average person, Facebook never gained traction in the first place, Instagram and Tiktok are not that suitable for communities, Whatsapp is purely a messenger - and Telegram appeals to everyone, being a hybrid of a social media and messenger. So, while I was able to avoid Whatsapp, Telegram is actually hard to leave. Unuversity, art meetups, education channels - all there. I did get a few people to use encrypted messaging with me, but most don’t care about privacy because Telegram is convenient and everyone is on there.

Blocking the server is not even the most effective way it can be restricted. If a country wants to gimp Signal, it can ban their cell carriers from delivering the confirmation codes. Or, on the contrary, if US wanted to restrict sanctioned countries, they could prohibit Signal from interacting with the country’s range of phone numbers.

Yes, you could rent numbers of another country to avoid that. But while pretty much everyone can figure out how to bypass website censorship, phone rentals are much more of a roadblock, especially if your payment method is sanctioned and thus you have to use crypto or workarounds. Not to mention that the number being temporary introduces a permanent security hole, and if it is not temporary - it’s an extra expense, which may be noticeable for poor people.

On a similar note - the issue I take with Signal in this regard is the fact that the stock app only allows their own censorship bypass proxy. Why not just arbitrary Socks?? Sure, you can use a whole-device VPN, but for a lot of people this is inconvenient (like if the free VPN is very slow), so a proxy for a background connection is much better. Thankfully, Molly addresses this.

I doubt this cloud infrastructure would be able to disobey the main organization’s orders or go on without it if said organization is told to shit down.

IDK, maybe it’s just the server only being personal, but I found Simplex and XMPP roughly equivalent (Matrix was very annoying, though). What features does XMPP do better in this regard?

But when you migrate devices with Whatsapp, there’s a database migration as well - so there is some familiariy with inconvenience. Anyway, certain XMPP clients make using the protocol as easy as Whatsapp. I’d say even more so since it’s snappier and wouldn’t suddenly cut off users of old phones

As for the lists - everyone is on some list or the other anyway.

I understand that my details would have to be sent to the company - however, I would really like to avoid posting them publicly. I have an argument for this - I know a lot of hacks begin with using Linkedin to find employees.

And even with Tor, if the person didn’t compartmentalize their conversations into different identities, they’d have the pseudonymous graph.

Why wouldn’t it? They had all the data in plaintext, they just chose not to cooperate. This was the only possible outcome.

Yeah. I know Ublock Origin can do this content blocking as well, but NoScript is just more convenient for me.

You may be confusing it with Mullvad VPN, which is an entirely unrelated company, and yes, it is going just fine.

The whole DivestOS project was ended, together with its apps :(

Trocador has prepaid cards sold for Monero, but I heard prepaid cards are often declined so it is a bit of a lottery. Not tried myself yet, so not sure what it depends on.

I cannot imagine spending $1000 on a phone in general. And even more so, I cannot imagine spending $1000 on a phone I cannot even sideload something like Newpipe on.

Since you are seemingly wealthy enough for this - maybe Pixel with GrapheneOS would be a right fit for you? Pixels also have longer support now (although I still think it’s very short, so I’d likely have to switch to Lineage afterwards).

fair