Both technologies are open source. It's a common model of compensation for the developers, pay as your able.

A friend hosts my instance. I don’t expect free as in beer hosting, only free as in speech code and protocols.

That's just the client, the server architecture is what really matters.

Thanks, yeah someone else said similar here.

When they dropped sms support I was no longer able to convince people to migrate to signal.

Before I could make the argument that you need one sms app anyway so that app might just as well be Signal instead of the one that comes preloaded with your phone. That way people would gradually get more and more secure messaging as time went on. When sms support was dropped, Signal could not replace an existing app and adding another messing app is much less appealing than replacing one.

Why are you friend with stupid people?

Why are you being intentionally disingenuous?

I will say it again just so it's stated.
People are not going to move to another service unless they can obviously see the benefit in moving to that service. People who are not technically inclined (that doesn't mean stupid) are not going to see the benefit.

Don't be rude about people you don't know anything about. Don't insult their intelligence just because they're not as interested in a very niche area of technology as you are.

::: spoiler spoiler

Why are you friend with stupid people?

Also note that if you are going to be rude about people you know nothing about, you had better check your grammar
:::

Thanks, appreciated. I installed Nord on my linux box as well, then set that to openvpn technology and obfuscated servers which worked. I'd prefer to use their quantum-proof encryption but there's no way to bypass VPN checks if one sets that. I think it's a mistake on lemmy's part to even put that hurdle up, but it is what it is. Having one's real world identity tied to social media is a risk going forward. Data is the enemy.

Deanonymized isn't a risk with end-to-end FOSS-governed encryption (as compared to Meta's mysterious backend that manages keypairs for whatsapp and messenger). Sealed Sender can even obfuscate the metadata of the recipient for further snooping hurdles. Nothing is perfect, and any participant can silently ex-filtrate conversation data with another camera.

Data is 100% the enemy and you're right, lemmy would be moronic to put that roadblock in place

They DID put that roadblock in place. That's kinda my point. You have to loosen a VPN's security to post here (as I've had to do to reply). It says "no posting from VPN" in the lower left if one uses more advanced/secure encryption. They also don't allow account creation from masked email platforms like fastmail.

What I said is that smart people can be convinced to move to another platform. Most of my friends are not technically inclined, but it was easy to make them use it, at least to chat with me.

What you did is change "smart people" with "people who already want to move", which is not the same. You then said it's not something you can choose (as you cannot choose to be rich). But I answered that you can actually choose your friends.

Never did I say people who are not interested in niche technologies are not smart. My statement can be rephrased in an equivalent statement "people who cannot be convinced to change are not smart", and I stand to it.