The fediverse is a far more robust free speech solution for social media than Parler, Gab or any other centralised platform. Parler and Gab will only be all about free speech as long as it suits them, all it takes is a change of heart or leadership to turn their heel on that promise. Twitter and Reddit both made the same promises in their early days. With the fediverse, that freedom is systemic, nobody can override it.

They were blocked by some other instances, but far from all of them. They weren't chased off the fedi, they left.

Plenty of conjecture there, but what evidence is there?

I hope so. Too often apathy rules in these kinds of markets. #deletefacebook springs to mind.

I wonder how many users are really making the move - the article doesn't say and I honestly never really thought that privacy was actually the main draw of WhatsApp. I thought people would just be using it because their friends were. If privacy was actually a valued commodity to WhatsApp's users, I would've imagined most of them would've split the second Facebook acquired the company. My general impression is that privacy, at least hitherto, hasn't been very high on the mind of the market at large. The most recent estimate of active users of WhatsApp I could find sat at 2 billion. Even if every single one of the 32.5 million new sign-ups to Telegram and Signal are WhatsApp exiles, it's still a drop in the bucket.

The infrastructure is already there. Decentralisation. It's how The Pirate Bay itself has survived all these years. Bittorrent is a distributed technology that can't be dismantled from any one point. They don't even have to host any content, their users do it for them.

He is right. It is embarrassing. As soon as I heard that AWS had taken them down, the first thought that ran through my head was, "They were relying on a big tech host? With no backup plan? Assuming everything would be fine? After watching what other alt-tech platforms have gone through? Surely they are not that naive?"

Oh wow. That is amazing!

I don't think that's right. In the torrent itself along with the zip file for the XP source, there's a text file saying the leak itself has been making the rounds for years, the zip is password protected, uploader can't access its contents so can't even verify if it actually is the source for Windows XP but was including it in the upload anyway.