That is all they claim to store for later retrival*, which is not the same as what they would be able to capture in real-time and hand over to law-enforcement if forced to by a court (and they wouldn’t be able to tell you about it because of a gag-order).

*However this claim is contradicted by the source-code of their server (which they sometimes publish) which seems to store significantly more and of course this is assuming the code is indeed the same as the one they run on their servers, which is unclear.

Edit: and their servers run on AWS, so even if Signal itself doesn’t store the IP addresses, Amazon certainly could.

You seem to be highly misinformed what metadata is. A server for example will always have access to unencrypted IP addresses from the clients connecting to it, this is impossible to avoid unless you use a service like Tor that relays internet traffic, but that has very little to do with “encryption”.

Except that most of the metadata isn’t encrypted anywhere and usually also can’t be encrypted as otherwise the service wouldn’t be able to function.

This is false. There is still plenty of metadata that centralized providers can capture and turn over and that is usually sufficient for law-enforcement to get the information they want.

You could have location based instances as most people will be mainly interested in contacts geographically close to them. Federation would be more of a nice to have feature in that case for nearby cities that run their own instance for example.

You can sign up on a Lemmy instance that runs the full image proxy.

The US doesn’t have exclusive rights to “America” as a name. In fact strictly speaking “Gulf of America” is not a bad name since it is the largest gulf in the Americas AFAIK.

In most cases printing money by the state (as opposed to quantitative easing by central banks) benefits the poor more than the rich. Austerity is what hits the poor the most, as well proven in the last two decades in Europe.

Inflation itself is a bit of a mixed bag, but it is basically a tax on having money, so it is also not really effecting the poor in the medium term at least. The best defense the poor have against the short term negative effects of inflation are unions that make sure their wages are always inflation adjusted.

I’m mildly interested to test it once their from scratch reimplementation of the XMPP backend works. Maybe I can then finally stop screaming at prople that still use Pidgin as an xmpp client despite it being at least 15 years out of date.

The most likely story I have heard is that these automated kiosks at McDonalds have built in face-recognition, but there is no officially legal agreement between law-enforcement and McDonalds to share this data, so they hushed it up with the unlikely story that an employee recognized Luigi.

/me mumbles something about the law in Germany that water has to be cheaper than beer on the menu.

You can say what ever you want in your own place. This place isn’t yours and we reserve the right to show you the door.

There are some credible rumors that Durov had financial issues during the pandemic and went back to Russia to strike some sort of deal with the regime there, which would also explain why since then there have been no further attempts to block Telegram in Russia.

This is what you get if you use silly generic terms as names for your chat protocol 🙄

No, that divide isn’t political. Its about utilitarianism.

The side you are opposed to cares more about getting many people “good enough” privacy, than getting the best possible privacy for a few while alienating most other people.

Apple also runs an ad business these days and their devices collect more types of data than stock Android does. And contrary to many Android phones there is very little you can do against that in Apple devices.

The default Android on them is pretty standard including Google Play services, so it is not great in regards to privacy (but could be worse, like an Apple device or so).

But for most of their models you can find good alternative Android roms or even mobile Linux distributions like PostmarketOS.

Built in fertilizer, and easier to throw to places hard to reach otherwise.

Signal as a centralized meta-data honeypot.

Feel free to moderate my posts here, no hard feelings 😎