ageedizzle

This is a similar idea to the lightphone. I would be curious to see a more detailed comparison of the twos features.

Is Signal compromised?

The fact that you disagree with a claim does not automatically make it an empirical claim.

It's clear from this comment that you did not read the full article. If you did then you'd have seen that the author addresses this criticism you're making here.

Recklessly leaking internal technical material (!)

Are they alluding to how they accidentally leaked some of their code?

still i suspect the largest barrier is merely that all the popular social media sites are actively captured by ad-driven development / leaders. That cant last forever, people are sick of it.

This is why it's a good idea to make the switch to federated alternatives like Lemmy/Piefed. The more people who do this the more people will see it as a viable alternative, making it easier to get away from the ad-driven model of social media.

What sets Bonfire apart from other federated social media networks?

It's not necessarily the case that Loops is just as addictive as TikTok. Because TikTok is more than just short term videos. It's also a recommendation algorithm that slurps up as much information as it can about you to predict what you'll want to watch next. This recommendation algorithm plays a big role in making TikTok addictive. And as far as I'm aware, Loops does not have this functionality. It will just show you videos based on a much simpler algorithm that takes into account how recent a video is and how many likes/comments it has, or something like that, which will make it less addictive.

its not even a prediction anymore, meaningful amounts of software engineering are already automated.

I hear claims like this a lot, but I never see anything to back it up. Do you have any evidence that this is actually the case?

What safeguards would be in place to prevent this parallel internet from also, with time, becoming a dead internet?

The self-assuaging fantasy that g itself doesn't exist is a classic example of a psychological defensive mechanism of rejection, one rooted in a need to defend a worldview that holds all people as inherently equal, when we're measurably, biologically not.

I think this statement conflates two different senses of the word “equality”. Equality of abilities is different from moral equality. It is perfectly coherent to accept that people aren’t equal in terms of their abilities but are still morally equal. For example, just because Person A is smarter than Person B it does not follow that the interests of Person A matter more than those of Person B, or that the suffering of Person A matters more than the like suffering of Person B, etc. So the view that g is real and people have different IQ scores is consistent with the idea that all people are inherently equal. Because in most contexts the concept of inherent equality is not a biological or psychological concept but a moral concept.