planish@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Something like Tor only solves half the problem. A Tor hidden service still has physical reality and a person who is hosting it, and who can be held responsible for failing to register the thing with the feds or file a moderation transparency report or whatever the latest nonsense is. The anonymity network helps to hide where the equipment and who the operator ism but there’s still a single point of failure.
We need a way to run online communities that are not online services: no single point of failure, no individual or partnership describable as a service’s operator, and no meaningful way in which one person provides access to the system to another person.
Misk@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I don’t know enough to know whether this is a dumb suggestion - but could web3 / blockchain hold some of the answers?
planish@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Probably not any existing systems; you can still finger and thus demand censorship from a block producer, and you end up with situations where you just can’t host the chain anymore because it’s full of pirated MP3s or whatever now.
And they introduce new problems around having to globally replicate everything and thus getting the net performance out of the system that you get from the worst server involved.
If you need to track some kind of root signing key for a whole p2p system, or something, maybe you can stuff it into Ethereum somewhere. But I don’t think you can get very far trying to actually run a service out of a globally replicated database, and even then you’d have hundreds of operators in legal trouble rather than no operator.
Misk@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The irony of Lemmy not letting me post this until I turned off my VPN 😖