kinda the same reason people suggest something like linux mint over slackware, gentoo, arch, etc… mint is easy to install and is preconfigured to be an easy to use user desktop environment. you can configure any other option to be have like that, but they tend to be a bit more “DIY”, which is great if you know what you’re doing!
dedicated NAS OSes will have good software out of the box that make it easy to configure and manage various common disk-related configurations (RAID, SMB, NFS, etc). you can certainly do all this yourself, but it might not have a pretty, unified user interface, or you might have to deal with software that isn’t compatible with some version of a library that’s in your distro of choice… all resolvable things, but they take time to solve: anywhere from installing a package manually to applying a kernel patch and recompiling the kernel to get something to work
a healthy democracy requires others to have privacy. people like investigative journalists need to be able to blend in with the crowd and expose government wrongdoing
blending in the the crowd is the important part: if everyone cares about privacy, nobody sticks out for caring about privacy… but if nobody cares about privacy, the investigative journalist suddenly looks really obvious and can be targeted much more easily
if someone doesn’t think they have anything to hide, that’s fine (wrong, but fine) however they can help to make sure the government acts appropriately simply by not splashing data around everywhere for all to see
i’ve seen the bullet points from that article riffed in different ways, but i think that’s the most important part:
They know you rang a phone sex line at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. But they don't know what you talked about.
They know you called the suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge. But the topic of the call remains a secret.
They know you got an email from an HIV testing service, then called your doctor, then visited an HIV support group website in the same hour. But they don't know what was in the email or what you talked about on the phone.
They know you received an email from a digital rights activist group with the subject line “Let’s Tell Congress: Stop SESTA/FOSTA” and then called your elected representative immediately after. But the content of those communications remains safe from government intrusion.
They know you called a gynecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then called the local abortion clinic’s number later that day.
for clarity, i think that the worst thing anyone’s been able to decisively prove about telegrams encryption is that it’s vulnerable to replay attacks… which in the context of privacy rather than full security isn’t suuuuper problematic
that’s not to say that there aren’t other flaws; that’s kinda the point behind “rule number 1: DONT INVENT YOUR OWN CRYPTO”: you just don’t know what flaws there are… AES (etc) has had a LOT of eyes on it
but for the most part, the negativity with the crypto boils down to what-ifs
zero days and all sorts of things don’t get fixed in updates… the fact that the software with the security issue has access to write to disk in a manner that can be executed is also a huge problem
i hope that everyone realises that the benefit of activitypub has nothing to do with mastodon taking to mastodon, lemmy talking to lemmy, etc but the strength is tooting a reply to a peertube video and having a discussion on lemmy in which all these comments are shared
… bluesky has none of this
however, what bluesky has:
(currently) the sign up process is easy: you don’t need to understand federation or why to choose a server - you just… register
honestly, more people interact in the circles that i’m in (no; it’s not furry: i hear though that their population has exploded though) critical mass is more important than anything for a social platform
custom feeds are legit cool af… i don’t have time to filter posts and we can’t expect people to add their own metadata; i want code to do it for me! its like “the algorithm” is now many and you can choose which one depending on your mood… also if you don’t like it you can choose a whole new one that some random 3rd party wrote, or make one yourself
none of that is intrinsic to bsky, or will remain in the long-term i think (federation implies needing a more complex sign-up process)
OSes have protections built in, yup, but that’s no guarantee. we like hardware switches because there’s physically no way that the mic/cam can be in use: software is always 1 bug or exploit away from not doing what it’s supposed to