You can’t simply say “we must assume” as evidence.

Okay yeah you definitely didn’t read it. Large sections in that doc just before that are on phone number identifiers, NSLs, and 5-eyes countries, the US goverment pushing signal in privacy spaces… literally the reasons why signal isn’t trustworthy. Unless you can tell me what an NSL is, then I’ll assume you didn’t read it.

While there may be other US government requests they are not alllwed to disclose, they were legally required to provide the same information to the courts, and we can see what they provided.

Did you ignore the large section on NSLs? These come with a gag order, meaning its illegal for signal to notify their users about them being spied on.

In fact, they implemented “Sealed sender” in 2018 where they are not able to see who the message is being sent to.

This is a “just trust me” from signal, since neither of us have access to their centralized DB, but you also ignored two paragraphs down, where it showed that with message timestamps and recipient information, this would be trivial to find the real sender of a message, regardless of sealed sender. Again, actually open source software can’t say “just trust me” like signal can, we actually have to show code to prove it, and let people run that code in a private manner.

And sure, while the US government funds Signal, you know who else endorses it? Edward fucking Snowden. If anyone knows about secure messaging, it’s the man that physically removes the microphone and camera from his phones before using them.

Elon musk and jack dorsey also endorse signal. An endorsement means nothing, especially for centralized software based in a 5-eyes country.

Read the linked doc, because it’s clear you didn’t.

Signal is a centralized, US-based service which requires your phone number (thus your real identity, IE name and address), has social networking graphs of everyone you talk to, and must forward that information to the US government when asked, as well as (by law) not tell you that they’ve been asked to do so. During the Obama era, 60 NSLs were issued for this private information every single day.

People overlook its privacy concerns for the same reason they do with apple: it has a shiny interface and is easy to use, and makes people very attached to it. Behind all that, is a surveillance network that its creators have explicitly said they do not want it to be able to run in a decentralized, private manner.

It has a long history of privacy offenses below (such as refusing to publish its server’s source code for years, its reliance on other US tech services (amazon, google), US-government funding, and a US-defense-tank friendly administration) which get ignored or shouted down by many of those above. See the article below.

Why not signal.

Pretty much any alternative is better, as long as its not hosted in a five-eyes country, and especially if it doesn’t require phone numbers or real identities like signal does.

I personally have been using SimpleX for friends and real life contacts, and Matrix for larger more anonymous group chats.

5m seems about right. Lemmy’s from scratch builds are ~3.5m on a fast machine, and we have ~60k lines of code, and are using some with large libraries with lots of features enabled.

But you really should only ever have to do a from scratch build either at the beginning, or when you deploy. When developing, your IDE should only ever really run check or clippy, which should take seconds at most.

Tasks.org or any markdown editor plus syncthing.

It’s quite possible that in the future, ai bros will rediscover “thinking”:

Dang that’s unfortunate. I thought t-mobile and atnt network bring your own phone type services will work, as long as they provide a microsim or esim.

It’s extrmely easy to degoogle xiaomi phones too, but they’re a bit more expensive.

I know this is mostly a joke, but its also incredibly dangerous. Just use an explicit tool like bfg

You can use rust and still use the GPL.

I’d prefer using v1 torrents for compatibilities sakes. Also v2 doesn’t appear to have anything that de-dupes similar torrents.

The yt-dlp command is already doing that, check the script.

I have a little helper in lemmy that shows how to view torrents the easy way: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html#torrents

The easy way of installing stremio will probably work for most people. Torrenting inside the browser isn’t an option IMO.

Minimo launcher is my new fave. Its simple, decreases addiction, and surpasses Olauncher in features.

Nice, I’ll check it out.

Torrents-csv does use a crawler I believe to add new torrents. torsniff is one of those spiders that works really well.

It might also be interesting to take an existing GUI like Freetube and try swapping out the backend with a torrent based one.

Ya I’m not sure how to handle the UI side of things yet, especially for content discovery.

There are projects out there to create a jellyfin / media server styel experience out there for videos downloaded using yt-dlp.

This doesn’t conflict with those, but is more about the hosting / sharing side. However you download youtube videos, its possible to use a media server to sync watched progress.

Do you think this could become popular enough it to be useful?

Everything starts from zero, so really it just requires a push for the project to get started.

Public BitTorrent trackers for other media are barely seeded as it is and they have been active for decades.

I don’t think I agree with this. Many torrents have thousands of seeders, and even if I search for old movies, I can find ones with at least a handful of seeders. Given the popularity of youtube videos, its possible that people would seed their favorites if they have the possibility to do so.

Actually considering the db is just one massive torrent.csv file I guess you can’t really sensor that.

Yep, its kinda wild, that the entire index of popular torrents (which equates to most popular media humankind has created), fits in a CSV file of less than 200MB. Makes it pretty hard to censor in that case.

I don’t use windows so I don’t know.

To truly decentralize the metadata layer, consider whether the search infrastructure itself can be federated or if the client should handle local indexing to eliminate dependency on any external discovery service.

A federated search service / index (especially unmoderated) could quickly fill up with spam. So at least the torrent additions / adders themselves need to be vetted and trustworthy for a search to work correctly.

And of course torrents-csv doesn’t have to be the only place hosting magnet links. They could easily be posted to any federated app, like a lemmy community or mastodon also.

This already exists, they’re called torrents, and lemmy works with magnet links already: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html#images-and-video