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Without delving into too many details, those presumed benefits of Signal matter very little in practice:

• Signal, just like WhatsApp, is centralized: as brokers of your messages, they do know your social graph. In the case of Signal, they "pinky swear" not to look at it, but that's not a technically enforceable guarantee (impossible by design). The same applies to metadata: Signal can absolutely infer from your usage patterns (frequency, time, volume, …) the nature of your social graph, or if you are rather at work or at home, in a romance or not. Signal can absolutely tell where you are based on your IP, or the device you are using. Worse, while they swear not look, not to care and not to log any of that, just by relying on third-party services and running in the cloud, they expose all this metadata to less trustworthy parties who will do the caring and logging as they are mandated by law.

• Nothing that can be said (or even proven) today about Signal is evidence that the same will remain true in the future. Signal can figure that it costs a lot to operate and might seek other financing schemes. Or its developers can be compelled by law enforcement to alter the service without public disclosure. It all boils down to "nothing is eternal" and while we can't tell when the demise of Signal will occur, history proves it's inevitable, and on this path it might turn as unlikeable as you find WhatsApp to be today.

The only way forward I see is to break away from the centralized model: by design, it can't guarantee your privacy ; by operating principle, it can't guarantee its sustainability.

Sorry to pollute this thread with my heretic use of the English language. I just wanted to add that any valid criticism against WhatsApp can be identically transposed to Signal: both platforms are centralized and rest in the controlling hands of a single entity, which may, on a whim, change the "social contract" under which it operates and ultimately deceives its users down the road. This is especially significant since operating at such a large scale puts an exponential (financial, technical, organizational, ...) pressure on the service.

Long story short, amongst the alternatives to this model, the most practical one is the federated model, where, like email, different accounts providers (such as hotmail, gmail, corp.com, ...) provide service to their users and broker messages to their recipients onto the larger network ([email protected] can send messages to [email protected]). XMPP is a good example of that, and NLNet happens to regularly sponsor initiatives which, over the years, have made XMPP a compelling alternative to centralized services, Signal and WhatsApp included.

leftist activism like tiktok

Lol, you might have missed a few news cycles if that's your take. Tiktok has been well documented as a vector of foreign interference while propping up right wing populist movements.

That's frankly mind blowing. About as much as parallel-collections gaining support for scala-native in the recent days, with the PR not even touching a single line of code (only through build configuration). The scala ecosystem is way under-appreciated :-)

One of them, for a 50% premium and worse finishing/less robust

Not in the way of ThinkPads being one of the last bastions of laptop durability and upgradeability, though

I've compared the two a while ago, seems to me like slightly different takes around the same core ideas. It's true that a couple of things in Ansel feel more natural, but it's not much, and it's probably not worth the risk (AFAICT the bus factor is one, compat with DT isn't a goal).

Darktable developers pride themselves for their non-destructive processing pipeline and use it as an excuse for how quirky and inflexible their UX is. I believe they are highly competent on the highly technical bits that ultimately very few people see or understand. Personally I can use it to an extent if I unlearn what other software have taught me over decades of UX conventions.

Isn't that the essence of the issue, that those models are loaded with biases, that might or might not overlap with dominant ones in inscrutable ways, hence producing new levels of confusion and indirection?

This is Microsoft enshittifying the platform they acquired to squeeze more revenue. But this is totally fine, because as user hostile and evil as the Microsoft corporation measurably is, they made a cute jpg few years ago about loving opensource or something (yeah, I know, those are different things, but I'm calling out their PR bullshit and the usual bootlickers)

I’ll bet people said the same thing when Intellisense started suggesting lines completions.

I'm sure many did, but I'm also pretty sure it's easy to draw a line between code assistance and LLM-infused code generation.

Telegram never was private, group chats never were encrypted (and that's not an opinion: the feature simply is missing). If anything, they are just removing their false and deceiving claims. That they remained there for so long is something I can't wrap my head around.