Love the overall tone of your post, thanks for bringing an atmosphere of cooperative work instead of religious wars.

I think there is a balance between being friendly, open-minded, and pragmatic on one hand, while still being able to keep high expectations to keep pushing the projects we love and support in the right direction.

A simple example of what I mean is my position is of course Signal. I have many reasons to heavily criticize it, the first one for me being their obsession with centralization, refusing any federated model. To my eyes, this is a massive concern. But still, when I am asked advises on which messaging app to use for a group of friend, that are a little mindful about their privacy, while not being tech savvy at all, I talk about Signal (alongside Matrix or XMPP). Does that mean I am absolutely sold to it ? No ! Does it mean I will recommend matrix forever no matter what ? Of course not !

The context matters. If the whole world was on Signal, I would actively fight against it. But the thing is : the whole world is one Facebook. And I see little reason not to wish they were on Signal instead !

My point is : between people that care and are passionate about this sort of things, let's have constructive debate and criticize the different alternatives, each other, and ourselves. But let's keep in mind that we are in this together with people that won't want (and legitimately so) to spend that much energy on those debates, and that being elitists assholes won't help.

P.S. : Privacy is mostly a collective issue. I'm an anti-Facebook purist asshole, with no account. But there are pictures of me, anyway, comments about me and my life probably all around. If you want to be an efficient solo purist, you'd better stop talking to anyone, and doing anything social.