I believe signal to be one of the best options right now. However, I'm also running a matrix server and working to convert my friends to that.
These challenges are never going to stop, but federated messaging is a big step forward.
But a for-profit company can select all of the nonprofit’s board members and thereby largely control the nonprofit.
This happens all the time w/conservation groups and environmental non profits and their unholy alliance with real estate mafia.
I also have no idea what that means, other than it looks like some kind of fluidity is allowed?
Here is an interesting read (HN thread/comments mentioned in the article too)
[..] By March of 2017, 15 months in, the leadership realized it was time for more focus. So Brockman and a few other core members began drafting an internal document to lay out a path to AGI. But the process quickly revealed a fatal flaw. As the team studied trends within the field, they realized staying a nonprofit was financially untenable. The computational resources that others in the field were using to achieve breakthrough results were doubling every 3.4 months. It became clear that “in order to stay relevant,” Brockman says, they would need enough capital to match or exceed this exponential ramp-up. That required a new organizational model that could rapidly amass money—while somehow also staying true to the mission.[..]
[..] That structure change happened in March 2019. OpenAI shed its purely nonprofit status by setting up a “capped profit” arm—a for-profit with a 100-fold limit on investors’ returns, albeit overseen by a board that’s part of a nonprofit entity. Shortly after, it announced Microsoft’s billion-dollar investment (though it didn’t reveal that this was split between cash and credits to Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform).
Predictably, the move set off a wave of accusations that OpenAI was going back on its mission. In a post on Hacker News soon after the announcement, a user asked how a 100-fold limit would be limiting at all: “Early investors in Google have received a roughly 20x return on their capital,” they wrote. “Your bet is that you’ll have a corporate structure which returns orders of magnitude more than Google … but you don’t want to ‘unduly concentrate power’? How will this work? What exactly is power, if not the concentration of resources?”[..]
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...
We need a protocol with competing federated servers. It's old news: Matrix, XMPP, IRC, e-mail.
Having an exit plan makes me less concerned about a centralized service - if FB/TWT/etc buy Signal many parties are strongly incentivized to fork the code and provide migration paths.
It seems every mainstream researcher now agree that the message delivery part of WhatsApps is now trustworthy.
That said the metadata and incentives story is about as bad as it can get[1] and in the backup department your chats can be uploaded wholesale to iCloud and/or Google Cloud if one of your contacts from the same conversations enable cloud backup.
[1]: Owned by Facebook and they shut off the revenue stream so the only way they can make money from it is by squeezing it of the metadata they get or introduce ads.
And then that got retweeted by Jack Dorsey. Now..I am a little worried. Do I want anything that has Jack’s paw prints on it. Since he and Zuckerberg turned up like creepy ideological twins at the senate hearings, I can’t tell them apart.
The first question on the Reddit AMA resonates. WhatsApp was great before FB bought that out. Who is to say it won’t repeat with Signal and someone else?