southerntofu

You are okay with NATO invading Russia and surrounding it with Aegis missile system

I'm not OK with either. But NATO did not invade Russia and AFAIK is not planning to. There is zero evidence to believe

Russia protecting Donbas citizens from Ukraine

I have no problems with that. But that's not what's happening: there is a full-scale invasion going on threatening the capital of Ukraine, where Putin's demands go far beyond independence for Donbass.

To you, Zelensky, who has a 25% approval rate and jailed the democratically elected Poroshenko and banning opposition media

What the hell are you talking about? I may be missing some details, but Poroshenko's wikipedia page does not mention incarceration, but mentions losing in the elections to Zelensky. To quote the article:

There was no true consensus (...) why Poroshenko lost (...) [:] opposition to intensifying nationalism, failure to stem corruption, dissatisfaction of overlooked Russian-speaking regions with his presidency (...) He is considered an oligarch due to the scale of his business holdings in the manufacturing, agriculture and financial sectors, his political influence that included several stints at government prior to his presidency, and ownership of an influential mass-media outlet. (...) His presidency was distilled into a three-word slogan, employed by both supporters and opponents: armiia, mova, vira. In translation from Ukrainian, it is: military, language, faith.

I'm not saying Zelensky is much better, but you seem to be ardent to defend an actual bourgeois fascist whose slogan is "military, language, faith" and inventing conspiracies around him? I mean if you do have reliable sources contradicting this Wikipedia article, please help improve it.

Or is it selective Cold War bias going on?

Yes there's selective cold war propaganda going on. And you're fully subscribed to one side of it. I personally am very critical of both sides of the propaganda, and supportive of the civilians and internationalist socialists/communists/anarchists suffering due to political repression on both sides of the border. As much as you dismiss Greenwald, he's doing a correct journalistic job on this topic: he's presenting the lies from both sides and supporting the victims (the populations). You're just a puppet of the Russian Empire. Which side are you on? Are you on the same side as Putin and NATO and other vampires playing the same game of geopolitics? Or are you on the side of the people who struggle against oppression and aim for self-organization at all levels of society?

I've read it. Some sources in there are interesting, but the material itself is completely disconnected from reality. In the sociopathic game of geopolitics, NATO expansion has certainly destabilized the balance of power and incentivized Russia to assert itself (and its claim on its former colonies). But you cannot compare countries forging military alliances, and a country invading another country... it's a completely different kind of escalation.

If anything, your article confirms that Putin is a colonialist bully just as much as NATO is in other parts of the world. It's just russian propaganda and does not account for mischief and imperialist ambitions on the part of Russia. If you want a more nuanced source, i'd recommend checking out Glenn Greewald's Twitter feed: it does a great job to denounce the hypocrisy of western powers, while at the same time acknowledging that invading a sovereign nation is always wrong, no matter what.

Ukronazi

What's this neologism? Are you not aware nazis are very well integrated in the State apparatus in many nations? It's not just Ukraine: it's also Russia, France, Germany... So why paint a single nation as nazis when more or less of all the parties involved in the conflict are varying brand of imperialism and racial/cultural supremacy?

supporting a planned Ukronazi attack on Donbass republics

What's the evidence that there was a wide-scale attack planned? If that was true, it could justify bringing military support to Donbass as an incentive for the central government not to attack, but how could it ever justify invading the rest of Ukraine?!

Russia also offered diplomatic solutions many times (since December, and in fact since 2014).

From this article, the demands formulated by Russia amount to saying eastern european countries can't have military alliances except with them (neocolonialism, much?). Interviewed russian foreign ministry says:

This is not about us giving some kind of ultimatum, there is none. The thing is that the seriousness of our warning should not be underestimated

That's not a diplomatic solution, that's extortion/bullying. "Do what i say, or else..." has nothing to do with diplomacy and nothing to do with the political autonomy of specific regions.

just a few days ago Ukraine threatened to develop nuclear weapons. That was obviously a red line for Russia

Iran did pursue to develop nuclear weapon for decades. Has that ever justified a full-scale military invasion from the USA? Oh yes, the USA fascists and hard-liners from the republicans would have loved that. Just like the various fascists, traditionalists and neo-nazis of Russia who love the flag and the military really love the idea of conquering Ukraine and reforming a Great Russia (like historical nazis liked their Great Germany). I did not think i would ever say this in my entire life, but do you realize you're spitting propaganda from actual fascists in the name of fighting against nazism?

Where has the US been which provoked the war and said it "stands with Ukraine?"

I have yet to see any evidence that western powers are in any way responsible for the war. If you consider the war is caused by the ukrainian government not respecting the Minsk agreements, then it's an internal policy matter and i fail to understand how that implicates the USA. Moreover, from all i could see western powers (at least in open/official channels) have been preaching for de-escalation whereas Putin was openly calling/threatening for escalation.

I hate the US and French colonial empires, but come on it's hard to blame them when another major colonial empire invades a country (which just so happens to be its former colony). In true internationalist spirit, we should be supportive of people struggling for freedom & equality on both sides across continents and borders. Fuck nation states and military organizations, vive la commune!

Yes there is a lot of russophobia and sinophobia on the part of conservative elements of society (remnants of anti-bolshevik propaganda), but there is also legitimate concerns against imperialist behavior on all sides. A lot of people you see criticizing Putin for invading territories are the same people you saw criticizing France invading Mali or USA invading Iraq/Afghanistan. A lot of the people here in France concerned with russian invasion of Ukraine are the same people who were very much against France joining NATO.

Not all of us are media-driven puppet who have to choose a side between equally-evil sides. I personally side with the people/communities who struggle against imperialism, whether it's zapatistas in Chiapas, various communities in Rojava, popular movements in Hong Kong, independentists in various french colonies (Guadeloupe, Kanaky, Bretagne), or the people of Ukraine who are facing military invasion at the hand of their former colonizer.

Of course we need to keep a critical look at western propaganda in this matter, and how separatists in certain parts of Ukraine are treated, but that does not mean we should support another colonial empire in this geopolitical game of sociopaths, and it certainly doesn't mean that people disgusted by military invasion saying "fuck putin" on internet forums are puppets of NATO interests.

Though it's fair to point out that the global empathy toward ukrainian people is both media-manufactured and based on ethnocentric principles of "white people are affected" and "it's a European country being invaded, not some African/Asian country". But in order to deconstruct these racist narratives and revive the internationalist movement, it's not a good start to support a dictatorial regime who's rebuilding the former Russian empire, is increasingly reinforcing the cis-heteropatriarchal dogma hand-in-hand with the orthodox fundamentalists, and has zero insightful criticism in regards to its own history of genocide and political repression (against muslim populations of the USSR, against anarchists in Russia/Ukraine, etc).

vassal state Israel

I'm not saying you're wrong suggesting USA and Israel (and France and some others) work hand-in-hand, but Israel is not exactly a vassal state. It's got political autonomy, a strong military industrial complex of its own, and of course its own colonies.

I'm not sure changing phone very often helps avoid "detection". I heard so as well, but i doubt this "breach" is gonna stay open very long, because it's very trivial to check how often you change phone number which could trigger a flag for account review.

You only need a SIM to register the account, you don't need to renew/change it every week :)

"A faster response"? Is this a satire? Matrix is the slowest chat network ever. 500ms is considered a good latency on the Matrix network! The Element client is the worst and unusable (because of latency) over Tor. I love what matrix is doing with P2P (among other) but "faster" is definitely not their selling point ;) ;)

Hello, sorry i don't know what phone guide you're referring to ("privacy" and "phone" in the same sentence sound really weird to me), but there's plenty of resources for "opsec"/"infosec" in a selfhosted context.

Here is a nice list of gamified challenges to reach. In addition, you may want to ensure you have Full Disk Encryption on your server (huge tradeoff: can't restart the server without entering your passphrase). Riseup also has tons of cool resources in their docs.

Like you admitted yourself, security and privacy are not the same. Running your own selfhosted services will probably leak more metadata than using shared services. For your personal conversations and your friends, it's a good approach. To organize political agitation against your nefarious nation-state, it's probably a risky strategy: breaking into your home to backdoor your server is easier and more discreet than to do the same for a shared host like riseup.

If you would like to give more specific about what kind of info you're looking for then maybe we can provide more detailed answer. Like poVoq said, we are interested to publish more guides on joinjabber.Org (we just started that project) to answer common questions/concerns. We have a draft FAQ (not merged on the website yet) about security concerns, please let me know if it's informative to you or if you have more questions.

I can tell there is more than just a world domination goal

You do sound slightly conspirational and delusional. Of course people are gonna fuck up other people, because that's precisely what capitalism is about, and we're conditioned from a very young age to feed into this narrative.

However, a lot of people try to avoid such dynamic, even in big evil corporations. Spitting on the face of these precise people is not gonna help anyone :)

He was making a good point. Huge multinationals often have departments with wildly different behaviors/policies. These departments are often in conflict with one another, or don't know so much about one another. I agree with you trusting anything remotely associated to Google is utterly stupid when it comes to privacy, but the argument exposed was not stupid.

It was in fact solid insider's advice, to know to exploit differences between branches of a given tentacular company in some circumstances. For example, Debian's cooperation with Lenovo for better hardware support is in fact a collaboration with a specific department within Lenovo, and has a lot of blocking points from other departments.

EDIT: Also another good point was that selfhosting services (eg. services just for "me") often leaks more metadata than using shared services which other folks connect to as well.