That doesn’t answer the question, they asked if it’s open source. I agree, I don’t want to replace one sketchy data-harvesting service with another, I’d be a lot more comfortable giving shutup10 control of my system if it was on github or gitlab.

Basically, repeat the experiment under a wide range of conditions, and show that the conditions for success, if any, are far beyond the original claim. I always loved the ‘mythbusters’ approach: if one bible can’t stop a bullet, how about two bibles? ten? where is the cutoff between true and false?

where do you find good sources to follow, then?

in a word, intersectionality. you’re getting people who were already looking for an excuse to ditch reddit and twitter, and of that group, you’re selecting the ones with the most tech literacy. That tends to overlap people with progressive politics.