@arisudotexe I've been thinking about this a lot, and you know how meticulous I am with my opsec planning. My analysis is that there are basically three ways to go about this:
Incautious advertising: Just actually saying state (or non-US equivalent) or nearest major metropolitan area in public presence. This is mostly only dangerous if the being has poor opsec to begin with - general geographic region can narrow down search attempts, but almost every very general region on Earth has enough beings that finding and identifying a single one conclusively should be relatively difficult. Though, of course, this will vary depending on population density and local prominence in addition to opsec quality.
Community coordination: An E2EE chat room, for the explicit purpose of radqueers sharing very general location info, getting to know others in their general area, and meeting up if they establish enough trust between each other. This would already be drastically safer than doing it in total public, as only actual members would be able to see, eliminating casual data slurping from the equation and enabling the owner to ban individuals known to have or strongly suspected of malicious intent. This could be made even safer by only admitting beings with some amount of recognizance in the first place, either within the community or with other existing members, to increase the barrier to entrance for antis and glowies and weed out all but the high-effort ones. Or, there could be both chats, to serve different levels of user threat model.
Educated Self-service: More or less what we have now, with radqueers needing to just make friends online, carefully, feel them out and establish trust, then mention their general location to see if it's anywhere close - 🤞 and hope. But we could improve it by providing guidance on how to think about doing this optimally - tips on how to recognize potential malicious actors, guidelines for exactly what to reveal and after what level of trust, that kind of thing.
Note that none of these options are mutually exclusive. We could just do all of them, and let beings pick the option that best fits their own comfort levels and safety needs. But that said, any of these are always going to be more dangerous than not meeting up. Beings can be not who they say they are, beings can change, and beings can have mental issues that cause them to lash out using sensitive information as a weapon. Antis and glowies will both want to take advantage of the additional vulnerabilities any of these paths expose. And, of course, there are the anti-cs, who have been well established at this point to be treacherous in the majority. It'd be foolish to deny that reality.
Nevertheless, as hard as it is, if we want this community to actually move forward, towards becoming more tight-knit and bringing about the offline well-being improvements we both know are possible, we're going to have to suck it up and deal with that. Those doing this are making the decision that it's better to take a chance with drastically improved well-being as a potential prize, and given how many of us are in existential danger from loneliness, I think the interest is there.
@arisudotexe Maybe we need a relationship word of sorts? A word or symbol meant to mean “wanting to meet up with other paras in person, but might need to get to know you online for a little bit first” ?? Like you can just say all that, but its a mouthfull isn’t it? And its easy enough to ask each other when meeting (online) what country they’re in (so you can determine whether its a good match)
Or we could have some sort of thread of “yes I want to”s but that seems way less convenient to me personally
Plus the word/symbol wouldnt be obvious to lurking antis, unless they spent awhile in the community to find it.
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