YOU are speaking!
Have you made any poignant commentary on the recent election in the U.S.? Do you have a good response to liberals who are upset with the results or process of the election? Have you written or seen something as a comment reply/post that you think has standalone value? Did you see a new take or analysis you hadn’t previously considered?
Whether it’s a long idea with lots of context, or a short and sweet one liner, we want those thoughts aggregated here. This post is intended to be a resource for comrades to draw from when having actual discussions outside of Hexbear both online or IRL regarding the election.
Consider this a mini-effortpost aggregator. This is not for shitposts, but humor is completely acceptable if it helps make the point.
Some things I would caution here for clarification:
Matrix is known to leak metadata and has weaker E2E encryption than other E2E encrypted platforms.
Signal is better than most platforms for one-on-one messaging (can also be used for larger groups but doesn’t have channels) but it has shady requirements like requiring a phone number and requiring an Android or iOS device (doesn’t support less corporate OSes like Linux as primary device) and the desktop application message storage not being secure (largely a desktop OS problem since their security tends to be horrible, but Signal could add more protections and doesn’t), and other weird things like requiring proprietary libraries and not having fully FOSS builds and crypto stuff. It’s not anonymous meaning theoretically the Signal backend could link sender IP addresses to exact recipients which is just enough data to be useful to intelligence agencies if Signal happens to be compromised (which they have received government funding in the past and suspiciously stopped updating their backend repo for like a year not too long ago). Signal is fine for the average person, but I’ve seen political activist groups use it and act like they’re anonymous and I would be very careful in that situation. Otherwise if you know people that use Signal it’s still better than most platforms, I would recommend using the Molly client which is actually FOSS and has more security features than the official Signal client.
Cwtch looks like the overall best alternative to Signal since it is decentralized, doesn’t require a phone number, has all of the main encryption features Signal has, and has an option for running a server to reduce battery life and increase message delivery reliability. Briar is similar and works over Bluetooth and local Wi-Fi making it a decent option for protests (if you even bring a phone). SimpleX Chat looks better than Signal as well since it doesn’t require a phone number. Also XMPP which is decentralized and self-hosted but it requires a server setup. I haven’t really used either of these platforms though so I can’t attest to whether they actually work well.
Lemmy and Mastodon are not private unless you are very careful in signing up for a public instance and not revealing your identity, assuming the instance you sign up for even allows that. However, they aren’t run by corporations with shady agendas which is the most important part.