“Built on AT protocol, centralized on BlueSky”. No thanks.

They will begin so, but the regulation means the authorities can backdoor your device way easier than they can today. It doesn’t mean your custom ROM device will be free of the scanning software forever.

It also means that you need to know that the receiving device you’re communicating with is clean custom ROM device, otherwise your messages will be scanned on the receiving side.

The regulation is a complete shitshow privacy nightmare hiding under CSAM trenchcoat. We’d do well to organize and fight against it, instead of trying to back down to the perceived safety of esoteric custom ROMs.

assuming the baddies don’t already have full access to your phone data

That’s the whole point of Chat Control 2.0

It’s great as long as you can guarantee that the person you’re communicating on the receiving side does the same. Otherwise it’s useless as your messages will be read on the receiving device. In practice it will make private communication extremely cumbersome and niche.

Also, the authorities can backdoor your custom ROM device at will, when seized.

ChatControl 2.0, if passed means your entire device is backdoored so it doesn’t matter what apps you installl, they can get your info pre-encryption

Good one, got a chuckle out of me :)

Getting really positive reviews from techbro YouTubers though

Yeah, the poster above said “no wireless capability” though. NFC is wireless.

Hard to use when having to ID you on websites

Their clients feed them with data. Given that Peter Thiel is behind Palantir, you can also pretty much count on all the big social media companies cooperating with them.

If we think Elon, Gates and Bezos are far-right, exploiting, scum billionaires, then Thiel is about 715 Texas sized football fields to the right of them politically. Dude is and has always been insane.

They’re still running on VC money so it’ll be a while. My guess: ads, selling user data, AI training on user behaviours, limiting what content is suitable (getting rid of NSFW), promoting corporate brands (so algorithmic advertising) and adding crypto in one way or another. And all the other tricks that older platforms have been doing.

And probably burying the thought of distributed protocol, hoping people will stop talking about it.

should work as cross-indexing domain-specific, configuration-specific video galleries

Yes indeed - this is great idea and probably the only way a “web scale” distributed video service can work - unfortunately this doesn’t quite exist yet. Even mature implementations like Mastodon have hard time dealing with “global” free text searching (or any kind of taxonomy). But maybe that’s the idea that starts a truly free web!

Brave (the company) has a long history of doing dodgy stuff. They are just trying to do what Google did (directing clicks to their own shit), but they’re using privacy as their marketing spiel.

I doubt it. Bandwidth and storage costs for distributed video on the scale of YouTube isn’t going to happen without some kind of monetisation beyond stray donations.

Places like Nebula have better operating models but they’re also very niche.

Bsky is just another VC financed grift though.

Same techbro hegemony as Meta’s “Facebook AI Friends” they are trying to roll out.

Had you said Teams is the most comprehensive collaboration platform I would have been right there with you.

But Teams is really just a Sharepoint front-end with tacked on voice and text chat. It’s not a messaging platform.

Depends on your threat model, as always. If you require absolute anonymity, it’s tricky, because it uses phone number during the onboarding process, so get an anonymous pre-paid number and discard it after registration. After onboarding you don’t need the number.

For the rest, it’s about as “private” as you make it. It supports group messaing, calls and video, so obviously you need to be careful while using it. Everything is e2e encrypted and stays on your local device, the source is available and has been extensively audited. The company itself is non-profit and has sensible privacy policy.

But yeah, your threat model is the key answer to your question