Comment on Changes to Lemmy/PieFed to adjust to living under fascism
poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 weeks agoI think this is a fallacy, and anyone that is old enough to remember the popular days of Bittorrent will have stories to tell.
Yes, in theory p2p models can be more secure if you really know what you are doing.
But in reality the users’ end devices are often the weakest link and most people have bad opsec. A server operator has often a much better idea what they are doing and systems like Tor or xmpp that allow servers to protect their users by not sharing all the metadata with every participant are safer for the majority of users.
rglullis@communick.news 2 weeks ago
You don’t need to go full p2p. You can still have servers and you can still have operators who work to prevent issues at the edges, but the servers need to be only blind communication relays and routers.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
There is no such thing as a blind relay. There will always be meta-data accumulation at such points in the network.
It is possible to try to minimize the meta-data accumulation and obfuscate it further and there are certainly some interesting theorectical concepts for that in systems like SimpleX, Nostr etc. but in the end most of these are just giving a false sense of security.
In addition many of these systems engage in what I call “trust-washing”, i.e. them proudly proclaming: “there is no need to trust us, bro!” When in reality there are multiple points of failure in their pretend to be trustless system that they just chose to ignore or try to distract you from.
And when it comes to the real-world, tried and battle tested system like Tor are where I would put my safety, not some brand new crypto-bro dondogle that is funded by venture capital investors (like SimpleX).
rglullis@communick.news 2 weeks ago
Even with Tor you also have to trust the exit nodes. So, yes, I agree you will still need to trust someone, but we can control/design to have less things depending on this trust.
Specifically with ActivityPub, everything is designed around the idea that the server owns it all. It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing.