I agree on the purpose of fintechs. They’re meant to shake things up and are, as a result, more volatile by default. It’s just hard to sell the average working-class person on that kind of volatility. And yes, my wounds from the Simple fallout never fully healed. lol

I think people forget that Signal’s model prioritizes security and privacy but not necessarily anonymity. Signal began as TextSecure, an E2EE SMS application, so phone numbers were originally a core part of its functionality. Apart from that, phone numbers are superior for contact discovery, and that’s primarily how Signal garnered such a large userbase. I suspect phone numbers are how they keep bots to a minimum as well.

Do I think Signal should still ditch the phone number requirement? Yes. I’ve been waiting for it, actually. But they’ve probably been working on a way of doing it that doesn’t significantly alter their current landscape.

Also, what is Twitter still king of at this point? Dysfunction, division, and data exploitation?

It’s likely because so many Fintechs fail or get bought out by larger banks/corporations that immediately make the product worse or deprecate it entirely. In the past decade, I’ve been a member of Simple, OneFinance, Envel, PointCard, and N26 (US division). Simple was bought out and deprecated by BBVA. OneFinance was bought out and stripped of all its notable features by Walmart. The last three are completely dead, Envel being the most recent. Novel technologies in finance are certainly needed, but the average person isn’t willing to trade stability for innovation.

I’m not sure what specific “media attacks” you’re referring to, but the criticisms of Operation Underground Railroad are valid and longstanding. Compared to other anti-trafficking organizations, OUR spends significantly less on advocacy across the board. Not to mention they’ve been unable to prove that they’ve actually helped anyone, and Tim Ballard won’t even release his employment records to address doubts about his ability to carry out this type of work in the first place. The film, while pretty good production-wise, is an embellished mashup of two still unverified OUR investigations, presented as something far more profound and consequential. In other words, it’s a cash grab, aimed at the kinds of people who believed Wayfair was selling children in place of furniture.

In that case, I shall relay the news. Cheers!

On a related note, I was introduced to Nostr/Damus by way of conversations happening on Bluesky and Mastodon. But those conversations were expressing skepticism about the ethos of this platform, largely due to the fact that they were already following the app’s account and its creator’s account upon signup. I’m sure you’re a swell guy, but I can also see why new Damus users might immediately get flashbacks of Elon forcing everyone to see his tweets. The optics alone might make this something worth changing.