Post #4335432

@JulianOliver for Mattermost, it definitely depends on the type of activism. If you're talking about more centralized organizations that want to control their own comms infrastructure, then yeah a trusted service like mattermost on that organization is definitely a good solution, so long as there's a plan for a subpeona in place and/or warrent canary. That's a very different application to a trustless service like Signal, which is far more preferable for decentralized networks of activists and non-centralized mutual aid groups. These types of networks inherently and intentionally do not have a central entity that can be trusted with the task of running a mattermost server and making sure everyone's comms are safe. It's far better in these cases to use a service with robust E2E encryption that doesn't require the server to be trusted, like Signal. I would really reccommend Soatok's blog for information on Signal and the viability of alternatives. They are a professional security researcher and cryptographer that puts a lot of effort and research into this topic. This article especially which outlines why platforms like Matrix just don't really cut it: https://soatok.blog/2024/07/31/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-signal-competitor/ And another article by them on the major security holes in Matrix which have not and arguable can not be fixed due to the architecture of the federation: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-olm-library/ Amd on the topic of police/mil collaboration, Signal is certainly better on this front. Certainly Signal is used by government actors, which is just a natural product of being a trustless platform, but Element actively collaborates and contracts with them. They advertise it proudly on their website: https://element.io/sectors . Signal is a non-profit that was literally founded by an anarchist and has a history of being allied with anti-surveillence and anti-state causes. Add on top of that Element taking formerly open-source features and paywalling them, which to me is ethically inexcusable, I no longer think they are on the right track in any way unfortunately.