Privacy

PGP has been around for about 35 years, more or less, and the single reason emails are rarely OpenPGP-encrypted is most people don’t know how to use OpenPGP. To get it right, we need to know what asymmetric encryption is, which algorithms and key sizes to use, how to include the correct key in our email signatures and how to make backups of our private keys. OpenPGP requires effort to use, and most of us invariably choose convenience over security.

What I’ve seen and read about the ‘Fediverse’ is quite promising, because I believe it could encourage something of a return to the kind of online communities that were common before social media, and that, I’ll argue, is objectively preferable. The ‘Fediverse’ is essentially a network of relatively small online communities, built on standards that enable the sharing of content between servers, and potentially those online communities could be designed to be superficially similar to the old phpBB-styled forums.