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

Good one, got a chuckle out of me :)

Getting really positive reviews from techbro YouTubers though

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.

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.

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

ChatGPT in its PhD thesis defense: “Oh, I’m sorry for the misinformation, let me try this again…”

I don’t have Threads or follow anyone from there but sounds a bit… complicated?

https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/17/threads-expands-open-social-web-integrations-with-fediverse-feed-user-profile-search/

I guess they’d argue that none of those pesky little data protection laws apply to competent authorities like the police and they’re probably justifying it with the criminal prosecution clause.

Great.

VC financed social media at the start of its enshittification journey. Started interesting with open protocol but seems it has no ambitions of being open.

Deleted my account 6 months ago and haven’t missed it.

If and when you send or receive e-mail encrypted by PGP, the body (contents) of the message is indeed encrypted and you’re safe from snooping and data collection, which is great. However, privacy-wise this might actually be a bad thing, because almost no one uses PGP and using it makes you stand out in a sea of normal e-mail users for someone who collects and analyzes lot of data. So if that’s your threat model, using PGP might actually be dangerous. Also, you have to remember and remind everyone to use PGP, which is cumbersome if you correspond with non-techie people. You don’t really know how they handle “their side” and PGP software is notoriously not very user friendly.

Whenever you send someone unencrypted e-mail from your Proton account, there’s a chance that the recipients e-mail provider (most likely Google or Microsoft) reads it. Same when they send it to you. It doesn’t actually matter that the message sits encrypted “at rest” in your Proton accounts Sent Items -, the contents have already been read, indexed and sold to a broker.

It’s very hard to do e-mail privacy because the protocol itself doesn’t have any built-in. It’s better to use other communication methods for sensitive transactions.

Then Proton should be fine. As far as I know, they don’t sell user data.

Of course as soon as you send an email or receive it from someone else, there’s a chance it will be mined, but while it’s ”at rest” on Proton servers it should fulfill your model just fine.

Depends on your threat model. What are you defending against?

At the protests? Surely the Palantir precog crime prevention analysts submerged in the cellar should have know this future crime was about to happen, well before the protest.