It seems centralized solutions (Telegram, Signal) are under fire recently. I wonder what would happen if federated protocols (Matrix, XMPP, etc.) were more popular and, thus, also in spotlight.
- "Would adding federation to Signal help with users behind country-wide blocks? Seems like a distributed service would be harder to censor than a centralized one."
- "It's trivial to block several distributed hosts simultaneously. An aspiring censor would simply find the most common federated endpoints for a given service and block all of them. Only the users of that software would be affected. There wouldn't be any collateral damage. If the censors somehow didn't hit every single worthwhile federated endpoint, users would still be left wondering why they couldn't communicate with most of their friends. Moving between federated hosts would also necessitate an entirely new identifier, so users would need to rebuild their social graph again.
In addition to being ineffective against censorship, there are several other properties and trade-offs that make federation a difficult proposition for an application like Signal: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/"
Federated services also require an identifier, and this identifier usually indicates where the user's account is located and how to connect with them (e.g. user@domain.com). As people share these identifiers, the aspiring censor can just keep adding new entries to the blacklist.
As for sharing IDs if you post them publicly then of course they are revealed and can be blocked.
If the more straightforward solution (VPN) isn't a panacea for censorship, then federation isn't either.
Matrix is currently working towards transparent migration (account portability) between servers with p2p as a longer term target - and meanwhile projects like Status are going all the way to p2p today.