[liberationtech] Time to Switch to Discord & Mozilla Firefox?

[axel simon]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 10:17:02PM -0700, Yosem Companys wrote:
> Discord: what Facebook is trying to become.
> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/how-discord-went-mainstream-influencers/584671/
> 
> Why to switch from Google Chrome to Mozilla Firefox.
> https://www.siliconvalley.com/2019/06/21/google-chrome-has-become-surveillance-software-its-time-to-switch/
> 

Hi,
Discord is interesting in that it's popular and offers people the possibility to have their own community (which they call "server", I believe), but there's nothing free and open source about it.
Matrix, and its main client Riot, are much more interesting to me currently, as they are (ambitiously) trying to solve multiple problems at once: a modern chat system, with voice and video and file sharing, with end-to-end cryptography, while maintaining a decentralised network architecture so that anyone can run their own instance, join and federate with the rest.
Current versions of Riot might not be entirely as slick as Discord, but they are getting better and they are very usable.
Incidently, Matrix has bridges to connect to other chat network (and ideally, bridge them together, hence the name), and can bridge to Discord. So there's a possibility of getting everyone to play nice with each other.

Regarding Firefox vs. Chrome, Firefox has been the only browser (with any relevant market share) that isn't the product of a for profit company for a while. While Mozilla have made questionable descisions at time (and outright mistakes at others), that alone should be a strong argument to consider where one gets their browser from. I recall reading a statement in an article around Chrome's release about 10 years ago by then-CEO Eric Schmidt explaining that at the end of the day, if you want to be able to really control and see what users are doing, you need your own browser. This was when people couldn't quite understand why Google would build its own browser when Firefox had manage to end the Internet Explorer dead lock and they had a good relationship.
That passage really stayed with me (and if anyone were to find it, I'd be very greatful, I can't seem to do so).

So yes, it's not that surprising that, when push comes to shove, the engineering teams working on Chrome have to bow to the business priorities of Google, the world's (more or less) biggest advertisement company.

Cheers,

axel

-- 
axel simon
mail/matrix: axelsimon at axelsimon.net
twitter: @axelsimon