One last thing about #Keybase and I promise I'll shut up... for now.
This is going to be an interesting test of how useful being FLOSS without being decentralized actually is.
A lot of people will now leave Keybase. Will they find ways to re-use their code to set-up a better service? Or is their code so tightly bound to their centralized service that it's effectively useless?
In other words, is being #FLOSS at all meaningful without being decentralized?
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@rysiek
Imo yes, look at Signal. I will put trust to service with centralized servers if everything is open source in their code. In that case they are providing you their service and ease of not setting and maintaining things yourself, because not everyone has technical skills to do it. Centralised services are not evil if every bit of their code is open to the public.
@nikolal I disagree.
The reason I disagree is the same reason why a techie with time on their hands and a server would still not run their own Signal server and roll out their own Signal client: that would be useless, because people who are on Signal are locked up in the walled garden.
So, if Signal does something abusive, dumb, or malicious, the code being open will not help is. We will still only have a binary choice of "use it or drop it".
@nikolal now, I wouldn't use the word, "evil" here, since it's unnecessarily emotionally charged. Problematic? Yes. Red flag? Yes.
They're not just "providing you their service and ease of not setting and maintaining things yourself", they are actively making it effectively impossible for you to maintain things yourself.
It's a fine line, but an important one.
@nikolal that being said, I will continue to use Signal, simply because it currently offers the most reasonable (to me, in my specific circumstances) trade-off between Doing Things Right, and being popular enough to be useful day-to-day.
I would still love #Briar to take off, big time. In fact, I should play with Briar again.
@rysiek I think that main problem is ease of usage, no end user (eg my grandma) should even know what encryption is but she should be able to easily install and use apps. Briar with grandma? Maybe if I come and set it up for her. Briar with friends in foreign country? No go. I support decentralized services but fact is that they are not user friendly, and average user uses Whatsapp and doesn't know what decentralization is.
@nikolal the "decentralized or user-friendly" false dichotomy is the new version of "encrypted or user-friendly" false dichotomy, which in turn is a newer version of the "FLOSS or user-friendly" false dichotomy.
The reason why decentralized projects (or encrypted communication projects; or FLOSS projects) tend to have worse usability is two-fold:
1. it is more difficult to implement (but not impossible!)
2. it's harder to get resources for that (VCs do not want to fund such commie ideas!).
@nikolal importantly, it is not *inherent*. That is, you *can* have decentralized, FLOSS, encrypted projects with a great UI/UX, if resources can be found for that.
Constantly floating the red herring of decentralized/encrypted/FLOSS projects offering a worse user experience is a great way of preserving the status quo.
Instead, we should be focusing on making sure people know there are projects that will not get you zoombombed with porn on a call with your boss, so that theyu get funded.
@rysiek My point is: Centralized -> cool if everything is open sourced and you have option to host it but not wanting to because you lack resources or technical skills
Decentralized -> Even better but there is problem of getting end users to use it, because everyone wants 'plug and play' experience and don't want to break their brains of choosing servers they want to use
