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I caution mentioning both Matrix, and Element as if they are synonymous – they are not (I’m quite certain that that wasn’t your intent, but the usage of the forward slash could be interpreted as such). It may lead to confusion for newcomers. It would essentially be the same as saying “I recommend ActivityPub/Thunder” to someone who you want to introduce to Lemmy. Matrix is the protocol, and Element is simply a client that interacts with the Matrix protocol.
I personally think that it’s sufficient to recommend Matrix if one is mentioning chat-app alternatives. Of course, nothing is stopping one from also recommending a client, but I don’t believe that it’s entirely necessary.
In that case, the email provider that you use makes little difference at all. Because of the way that email works, it will always be visible in plain text (unless manually encrypted through PGP) by a third party other than the recipient at some point. There is of course the exception of, for example, direct communication happening between two Proton Mail accounts, but this is really hardly worth mentioning in any practical sense.
The long and short of it is that email should never be used for secure communications.
Are you going to audit all the code you use ? You need to trust some organizations to make the audit. You NEED to trust some entities
While lacking in practicalicy, this is not a new idea. While It is certainly not impossible to have an entity that one can completely trust, I would just argue that such certainty is improbable.
What I’m trying to get at is that one shouldn’t approach this question from an appeal to authority – i.e. Proton is trustworthy, therefore all of their services must be privacy friendly, and secure. The russian proverb “trust but verify” comes to mind.
at the very least, this is unimplementable for an email provider.
If one ignores the collection of metadata, then this is the very purpose of PGP.
I am trusting someone for my data
The point that I am trying to make is that one should never have to trust someone with their data – if all data is encrypted, for example, from a privacy perspective, it really doesn’t matter where it is stored. Of course, metadata can still be gathered, but that is, in my opinion, a lesser issue, and the user has some, if not complete control over it.
I should also say that it depends on what you mean by “trust”. My response, and original comment are under the assumption that “trust” is referring only to privacy.
The issue with email, unless you are comumnicating between two Proton Mail accounts, is that your message will likely be stored on another server which is extremely likely to be unencrypted. The bottom line is that you can never trust the rest of the infrastructure, and you have no control over it. You can end-to-end encrypt using PGP, but this is extremely impractical.
Do you trust Proton?
For starters, such a question is coming at it from the wrong perspective. One should have trust in the software – if such sowtware is, indeed, trustworthy – and not in the entity that created it. If one seeks privacy, then they should be of the mindset that every entity is malevolent.
It matters because American culture currently prefers everyone to have a college degree as opposed to any other type of education. […] If this avenue was cut off then the attitude of the public would change to allow other means of education.
I completely agree that our favoring of, or requiring of post-secondary degrees for employement is an important cultural issue. I don’t agree, however, that the solution is to make the provision of loans illegal – illegalization is rarely anything else than a band-aid on top of a gaping wound. An argument could be made that the government provision of student loans should be stopped (in countries where that occurs e.g. Canada), but I don’t think the solution is to simply make all student loans illegal.
and then yoke them into debt for the rest of their lives.
Hm, that is an assumption. There’s a few issues with that statement. The total cost of one’s loans are directly related to the cost of the post-secondary institution that they decide to attend. There is little reason to go to a very expensive institution. I do understand that some employers are elitist in that they won’t hire anybody outside of an ivy league school, but I would wager that that issue is not very prevalent – the free market should take up the slack. Furthermore, one’s ability to get out of such debt is related to the income that they expect from employment after attaining their degree, as well as their level of monetary responsibility, and savviness. If one decides to blindly go into student debt for studies that will offer little in return, that is one’s own risk to take. You must also not forget that there is no requirement that one must do white-collar work. Trades do not require such degrees, and are just as well-paying, if not better.
It could be as simple as updating a post with an outcome. You paste in a link and don’t realise until too late that you actually pasted in your personal email address. Do you then have to delete the whole thread and all it’s 1000 comments?
Hm, that’s actually a very good counterexample. I hadn’t considered that.
A bug report has been submitted for that here.
If we prioritize discussion above all else, we’ll get more discussion, but the average quality will go down
Not necessarily. One must look at the underlying reason(s) for why people aren’t contributing to discussions. If it is indeed that they have nothing of quality to input, and are then incentivized to do so, then, yes, that will cause a reduction in discussion quality. But what if, instead, users capable of producing high quality content aren’t contributing because they don’t feel that their opinion is welcome in the discussion – that they are afraid of being harassed, or ostracized? If these users begin to contribute more, then the quality would theoretically increase. Of course, it wouldn’t necessarily be that simple in practice, but I would assume that it would have a different effect than the former example.
A lot of low quality discussion isn’t going to attract the type of users that made Reddit great
I am hesitant to agree that Reddit was consistently producing only high quality content 😜 I would argue that the more likely explanation is that there was a flat increase in volume of content being posted, and the people sorting by new had statistically more good content to choose from. Unless, of course, this is what you are referring to.
I think better moderation tools is more important than comment and post edit history
I strongly agree. Not because I personally have any use for better moderation tools, but that appears to be a major, and most likely primary complaint that many people have when they come to Lemmy from other platforms like Reddit.
Sure, but then your comment chain doesn’t make sense, or if it’s a post them you lose all the comments.
I would assume that if there was information that is being redacted, then it would happen very early on in the posts creation – presumably before any comments are even made.
I disagree
How come? If you can censor the edit history, then you can’t trust the edit history. Perhaps something that could help was if the edit that was redacted should be replaced with an entry that states something like “This edit was redacted.”. In my opinion, this is inferior to having a persistent edit history, but perhaps it’s a potentially functional compromise.
It’s not something I would care about or ever use.
I think it’s better to look at this not from the perspective of one’s own personal gain, but the benefit that it provides to the site on the whole.
It comes with significant unresolved problems already pointed out
Would you mind stating the exact “unresolved problems” that you are referring to?
it mostly just seems like you want it for reasons of idle curiosity or paranoia.
I believe that the feature’s existence provides the passive benefit of increasing the average quality of posted content.
Most importantly, if a lemmy dev already said no, and you aren’t willing to do the work, then it’s dead
What’s bothersome about that is that the dev didn’t just say that they didn’t want to work on it, they closed it. I completely understand if the dev doesn’t want to work on it personally, but closing it gives one the feeling that future discussion on the topic is not wanted – not to mention that it also greatly reduces its visibility.
opening a thread about it isn’t a helpful way of fixing that.
No, but I wanted to have more discussion that what was had on GitHub. I figured that posting about it here would yield a much larger audience, and, perhaps, less biased opinions.
Aha, yeah that is also an option. If signatures are possible, it would be less maintenace compared to hosting an instance. Also, I think other instances can still overwrite your data should they choose. It’s just stored data after all – if it’s not inherently tied to the user, then anybody can modify it; having federated servers only increases this attack surface.
It adds nothing to the discussion.
It wouldn’t technically add content (unless you count the peristant old versions as added content), it provides passive improvement to quality.
Also, I’m hosting my own instance (for others as well) and the (unoptimized) storage use is already huge.
What portion of that is text, and what portion of that is media?
No need to pay for something I don’t really care about.
Do note that, presumably, were this feature to be implemented, it would likely be able to be disabled on the side of the instance – meaning that your instance wouldn’t store any of the edits itself.
I actually don’t think it is required to trust people on a forum in the way you suggest.
Why not try to improve it though?
If I was in what I perceived to be a really high stakes discussion (read: flamewar) where I was worried about this, I would take my own measures to ensure I could “trust” the other parties. I would save my own copies locally. Reddit RES had a button you could add client side for just this kind of petty bullshit. If you really want the feature, implement it in your browser/device.
I don’t really understand the argument hat you are trying to make. You are admitting that this concern is justified, and that there are scenarious where one could be expected to want to take such measures, but you don’t want a feature for this built in. Instead, you’d want a 3rd party plug-in…? I must ask: Why? Also, TIL about Reddit RES. Neat.
If someone is going to such lengths as to edit their post so it looks like you are responding to something else to make you look bad, it is either: a) a boring joke, or b) they are really pathetic and sad trying to sabotage you. Either way, it’s not the end of the world. If it sticks in your craw, you can just go edit your comment to say “edit: the comment to which I am replied was substantially edited after I posted so what I said no longer applies”. You can either delete what you said, or correct it, or leave it as-is with a caveat.
The point that I am trying to make isn’t that this is for my own benefit, it is that this sort of behaviour detracts from the quality, and usefulness of the information on this site on the whole. Information shouldn’t be purely ephemeral. The reliable exchange of information on forums is invaluable in the modern age. I couldn’t even hope to count the number of times that I have gone through old forum posts reading people’s opinions, and conversations when conducting research on a topic, or troubleshooting an issue.
Thunder has an option to dim read posts.