I want you to join my group on MeWe
With big tech censorship growing, I decided to start a group on the privacy based social network MeWe. Join and support the mission to protect privacy.
Incognito Blockchain Group on MeWe
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Hadn’t heard about MeWe before, decided to look over it. It appears to suffer from many of the issues that big platforms and most alternative platforms suffer from.
Starting off, they’re centralised and do not run a zero-knowledge service. In the event of a hack, leak, or a major government knocking on their door: any privacy given by their policy is retroactively thrown out the window. In addition, for users in the United States [excluding California], they could change their policy at any time and begin selling those users’ data. California, the UK, and the EU all have laws preventing this.
Centralisation can be tolerable in a handful of scenarios, like in the case of a single community forum, but it’s not acceptable for a platform that’s intended for mass usage. It also goes against the very vision of the internet.
What’s even worse is that features that provide zero-knowledge privacy, such as end to end encryption, are locked behind a premium subscription.
On top of that, their terms of service prohibit the use of third party clients, freedom to choose what client you use or being able to write your own is an important aspect of technological freedom.
Incognito already has this Discourse forum, it’s fairly easy to join and provides an official space for discussion around Incognito. Discourse is Free and Open Source Software and as such there are no restrictions to using third party clients. Plus there’s not much point in splitting the community across even more platforms.
Incognito could improve by dropping the usage of Cloudflare, Cloudflare has been a major factor in the further centralisation of the internet over the years and should not be used by any privacy-centric platform. Same goes for Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.
Aside from that, it’s probably best to let platforms like Facebook/Twitter/Etc die off rather than try to replace them, they’re intentionally designed to be addictive and humanity is better off without them.
If you want a way to communicate with friends/family outside of centralised tech’s grasp, it’d be best to support and use something within the crypto scene such as Session. It’s still a young project and somewhat buggy though, so beware of dragons.
Try to avoid falling for the marketing tactics of for-profit centralised services. They all share the same goals of maximising profits for owners/shareholders over all else and don’t care about their users outside of extracting profit out of them. The only good, reliable, and trustworthy service is one built from the ground up to provide security and privacy, preferably with anonymity by default built in as well.
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