We need direct democracy. What we live in is no democracy at all, they choose for us and then we just pick the worst of two evils.

Old people are hard to change, but you can always try. Still at very least we should motivate young people to use this decentralized alternatives and not trying to promote centralized ones like Signal.

I suggested XMPP in my original post. It is hard, but still will take just few minutes, for a lifetime of solved privacy and centralization issues. Unlike centralized apps, decentralized networks don't really die, just look at email. XMPP is over 20 years old and will live for 20 more, few minutes spent to set it up is well worth it.

By starting early enough and being persistent. It will take time, but we had this issues for decades and we will have it for decades more. Best time to start a revolution is yesterday, second best is today.

We are all normies

Not really true, people are willing to fight for a better life and a better world. We just need to organize, to fight together. There is a lot each of us can do make using these decentralized apps more convenient, including simply making valuable content on these networks, but also translating it into different languages, reporting bugs and trying to fix them or write tutorials on how to use it or get around a bug.

Most of these battles are very interconnected. Destroying one part of this horrible system will leave a flank open for the rest to fall.

They need to spy on us, so they can stop any real fight, riot against other issues that are plaguing us, like inflation, climate change and etc.

Why would you need to trust their choice? The only data that is sent from your server to theirs is your username (called JID in xmpp terms) and E2E encrypted message. The worst thing their server can do to yours is to send you a message, if your server decides to pass it on.

You can pick servers run by groups that have just as good record of privacy or even better or are run by the person you know or yourself.

When you have a decentralized service you can choose who you trust, you are not stuck with one corporation. Picking a completely random server is the worst possible example you could have chosen.

I never claimed that you should pick a random server. You can pick servers run by groups that have just as good record of privacy or even better or are run by the person you know or yourself.

When you have a decentralized service you can choose who you trust, you are not stuck with one corporation. Picking a completely random server is the worst possible example you could have chosen.

I think XMPP is more well-known than SimpleX, I simply mentioned Briar for the sake of possible ease of use argument over some XMPP clients.

I disagree, both about alternatives and about trust. I outlined XMPP (and even matrix) as alternatives in my post. If only popularity is an issue with these alternatives than we have to work on that, to make it popular, that is what this post is for. Just like Lemmy had few users once, XMPP and matrix are not as big as Signal. But their design is better and their use should be encouraged. I don't think that trusting a single entity, such as Signal is something we have to do. Trust should be only depended on if there is no way to build a system without or less of it. It is better to fight for it now, since Signal use can eventually grow and make it harder to switch. We can debate over likeliness of this corporation being good forever, even when it's current members are replaced (due to old age if nothing else), but I think it is easier to debate over their capability to be good if they are under pressure of US security agencies. Even if they are willing to risk their freedom (and their lives) for their users, they can't stop the government of shutting them down. The state has killed people for far less over the years.