Another centralized silo is not the solution, and Threema was recently sold to a dodgy investment consortium that seems to have been purely set up to hide the true owners (and all the original founders of the company left).

I recently read an interesting article from someone that helped with the initial design of Signal and who left in anger over Moxie Marlinspike refusing to even discuss the option to not require phone numbers. From the article it was very clear that this was apparently non-negotiable from the start…

The other interesting detail was that apparently there was enough money involved to fly developers from all over the US to Hawaii for a week long hackathon in a rented fancy villa for building the initial Signal prototype, coincidentally very close to the NSA facilities that Edward Snowden used to work in… and this was way before they got the large donations from the WhatsApp founder.

Of course this isn’t proof of anything, but it has a certain smell to it.

The first - and definitely worst - experience I’ve had was 2 years ago when I got banned from !europe@feddit.org for “racism and gaslighting” on the basis of, well, pretty much nothing except the moderator’s paranoia.

It wasn’t me, but looking at your moderation log and the messages in question, I would have called it “islamophobia and downplaying neo-nazi crimes” and banned you just the same. Others are welcome to have a look at those messages and judge for themselves 🤷