Use Tor.

Do you mean Tor Browser? Because using Tor alone won’t stop fingerprinting.

Related: A very similar question posted by the same person yesterday.

How to turn them square?

I don’t think yt-dlp has built-in image cropping, so it’s just going to download thumbnails in the resolutions provided by the server. (See the --list-thumbnails option.) To crop what you download, consider a tool like ImageMagick.

Obviously you need someone joining the room for the room metadata to be shared between homeservers.

Well then, your assertion that Matrix gives it freely is false.

Not so with Matrix, where a joining homeserver get full retroactive access to all the room metadata since the room’s creation.

This is false, too. Historical event visibility is controlled by a room setting. (And if you don’t trust admins of a sensitive room to configure for privacy, then you’re going to have bigger problems, no matter what platform it’s on.)

Edit: I suppose you might argue that you can bypass this by running your own homeserver and attempting to join the room from it, thereby granting visibility not through joining (as you wrote), but instead through federation with the server you control. The thing is, you can’t do it without permission. Room admins can simply deny your join request when they see what server you’re on. This might make sense in a particularly sensitive room, for example, just as it would to restrict history visibility.

you really need to stop privacy LARPing

LARPing? I’m not the one stirring up drama with falsehoods and patronizing snark, am I? Farewell.

Matrix stores all this info and gives it freely to other servers retroactively(!)

Can you show me the part of the spec that allows a server with no room members to get private room info from another server? I’m skeptical, but if true, I believe that would be worth reporting as a bug.

network layer sniffing (which is anyway much harder to do)

You’re funny.

The network layer of all internet servers reveals almost everything you listed. Signal has the same problem, and there’s nothing they can do about that. The only way to avoid it is to use a completely peer-to-peer model (Matrix has started work on this, btw) and avoid communicating across network routes that can be monitored.

There might be one exception, depending on what you mean by “Accounts”: The user IDs participating in a room can be seen by server operators and room members. But then again, server operators can already see their users’ IP addresses (which is arguably more sensitive than a user ID), and I believe room members have to be allowed into the room in order to see them. For most of us, that’s fine. Far from a disaster.

Human behavior is funny, isn’t it? No matter what the topic, there are always people around who like to repeat criticism they heard from someone else, even if it’s so vague as to be useless (“metadata disaster”) or they don’t understand the details at all.

It’s not a disaster. A few minor bits of metadata (avatars and reactions, IIRC) haven’t been moved into the encrypted part of the protocol yet. If that’s a problem for your use case, then you might want to choose a platform with different flaws, or simply avoid those features. It’s already good enough for the needs of many privacy-minded folks, though, and it continues to get better.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch more than half of this.

tl;dr: This video is a misleading, sensationalist, bad-fath, hit piece. It’s constructed upon faulty logic, fear of things used or supported by governments, and a single anonymous person’s poorly-reasoned conclusions.

Not a Google fan, huh?

Maybe a pool of big corp captive portal / connectivity test servers? For example:

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-devices/warp/deployment/firewall/#captive-portal

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/refs/tags/android-9.0.0_r49/services/core/java/com/android/server/connectivity/NetworkMonitor.java#101

For example: Let’s say your email is [email protected].

YSK: These domains are reserved for use in examples:

• example.com
• example.net
• example.org

Why YSK: Using these instead of made-up domain names reduces the chance of confusing readers, eliminates the possibility of phishing attacks, and avoids sending unwanted traffic to made-up domains if they happen to belong to someone.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2606#section-3

They did, but had to stop because they were attracting illithids.

I’m on Debian Stable (with a few backported packages) for both work and gaming. It’s not the most beginner-friendly distro, but I’m no beginner, and I love how low-maintenance it is. It just keeps on working.

I would like to try Qubes OS eventually. I don’t think it will be ready for gaming any time soon, but for privacy and security-minded isolation of components, I expect it’s tough to beat.

I don’t like closed systems, vendor lock-in, overpriced tools, or buying equipment that I’ll never truly own.

No, I would not say that.

I used XMPP in the past, but long-lived public server support is almost nonexistent these days, and proper setup/maintenance requires too much tech skill for the general public. Also, it lacks modern features that many people have come to expect. I would only suggest it for small groups, and only if you can run your own server and provide tech support.

For my needs, Matrix is the best available today. It covers the things that I find most important, and is constantly improving.

There is no best, because none of them cover every use case or threat model. However, these are worth considering:

• Matrix, if you don’t mind minor meta-data leaks (reactions and avatars have not yet been moved to the encrypted channel, IIRC).
• XMPP with OMEMO, if all your contacts are technically skilled enough to manage the requisite clients, servers, and protocol extensions, or if they have a skilled admin to do it for them.
• Signal, if you don’t mind linking a phone number to your account, can tolerate an ecosystem effectively married to Google, and accept the risks of a centralized service that can be attacked or shut down by someone with the right access or influence.

In situations where your safety depends on anonymity from the powerful or well-connected, I would instead look for a messaging system tailored for such things. (It would, of course, require giving up some convenient features that most of us expect from a general-purpose chat platform.)

You can, but that doesn’t solve the privacy problem, since all the aliases on your custom domain correlate to the same person (or small group of people) and can therefore be used for tracking.

Anyone using a forwarding/alias service might also want to search the web for “disposable” email domain blacklists, and petition the maintainers to remove the service you use from their lists.

These lists are often adopted by web developers, leading to many web sites rejecting forwarding addresses, or sometimes even accepting the addresses and then silently dropping messages while claiming to have sent them. As these lists become more common and widely used, forwarding services are becoming useless on more and more sites.

In that situation, I would also:

• Only use it through a browser (with fingerprinting protection), never a Discord app.
• Dedicate a browser installation, or at least a user profile, to Discord.
• Only use it over a VPN connection dedicated to Discord, or Tor if it’s allowed.
• Have an alternative channel (maybe Matrix?) ready and waiting for contacts who might be willing to switch.

Delta Chat

It’s an email front-end with opportunistic PGP, including all the drawbacks thereof.

Not really comparable to a modern e2ee instant messenger.