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by kuschku 3154 days ago
It's not about conspiracy theories, but about concentration of power.

If control of PIA — for whatever reason, and be it that Andrew Lee dies and his heirs sell it, or that he can't finance it anymore, or that a three-letter agency forces him to — ends up in the wrong hands, then also all of Freenode and Snoonet end up under control of that entity.

It's not that I don't trust PIA, but that I fear that PIA itself may end up in the wrong hands.

And I'm not on a crusade against PIA — I won't complain about their donations without requirement to advertise in return to projects such as KDE, with a transparent funding process.

But I am on a crusade against centralizing any services, be it killing XMPP federation (thanks, Google), be it pushing a "secure" Messenger that is bound to a single social graph and server infrastructure controlled by one group in the US (thanks, Moxie), or be it a single compsny gaining significant control over several major IRC networks, clients, libraries, and over Matrix at the same time.

No matter the intentions, how good they may be.