I am torn on how to handle both Signal and BlueSky. They are definitely outside of the big tech, privacy violating bunch but ultimately still part of the US ecosystem.
Especially the recent event that Elon pressured the Reddit CEO to censor a subreddit keeps me thinking.
- BlueSky does in theory have federation support, but it is still in its infancy. It is also still a company, albeit a public benefits one, and thus has a commercial interest. Most people are leaving X for BlueSky so true momentum is building there rather than in Mastodon.
- Signal is a foundation but servers are fully US based thus still under US jurisdiction (like the CLOUD Act). Signal is the biggest alternative messenger and even there it is hard to build enough momentum to move entire groupchats from Whatsapp to Signal.
How do you view the situation?
Signal is a real non-profit, they have a long history of putting their money where their mouth is and the usability is just so much better than any other alternative to Big Tech messengers with E2EE - I would be fine using Matrix, but my grandma can’t and most people my age or younger already get the creeps at the mere suggestion of using a privacy-friendly messenger.
Blue Sky is just another American company IMO.
So far Signal has stuck by its values, and a number of times it has threatened to pull out of a country if a new law would force them to compromise on encryption /privacy
For example, most recently
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3850597/signal-threatens-to-leave-france-if-encryption-backdoor-required.html
I’m not sure if they would do the same with the US, but I don’t think they’ll just agree to the demands that easily.
As for bluesky, I don’t have much faith in them