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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how uncensorable this really is. If there's no moderation and there are posts violating FOSTA/SESTA, I'm pretty sure someone is going to be having a talk with their domain registrar at minimum.

They're running on AWS (ask Parler how that's working out) and their contact is a gmail address, this seems like the opposite of uncensorable.

Their github repo mentions "A host with good capacity and DDOS protection would be helpful to the project," which I'm assuming means it's also extremely vulnerable to DDOS.

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As soon as this contains some illegal content - child pornography, violent/obscene content law enforcement will start going after anyone hosting a mirror and the ISPs/Hosting providers they are using, the whole thing will crumble like Napster.

The Achilles heel of all these services

In the US it’s illegal to provide communications equipment or service to terrorists

Sure, support decentralized chat services where terrorists are moving to avoid Twitter

Enjoy having the FBI come to your door if they find out you have nodes on those networks

Trusting people you don’t verify is never a good idea. Building a protocol that verifies computers but not the user of the computer is insane

Oh yes, nice math you got there. But who is really on the other end?

twitter and reddit are full of this

Not to mention anti-Semitic tweets, & in the past Isis accounts, who were shutdown by a "3rd party".

So member.cash is an instance of Member - it's there to make it easy to see how it all works.

Member is open source, so you can host a mirror on your own infrastructure. You might make that mirror available publicly, or you might use it privately. Shutting down all the public instances would likely be a game of whack-a-mole. Similarly, its not dependent on AWS, or a gmail address.

While a single website might be vulnerable to DDOS, the vision is many independent instances which will allow for great redundancy.

So is this a federated thing like Mastodon, or is everyone operating a mirror running a copy of the whole site?

From what I understand the messages are stored in the Bitcoin Cash Blockchain

It is not federated, each mirror uses its own Bitcoin Cash node which contains a complete record of all the actions on the blockchain.

Yes, but how would one go about removing posts that violate human decency? If I were to host an instance, I would want to not host any content illegal in my country (Child Porn for example). How do you go about preventing that?

You can't prevent that, and that is the inherent flaw in Member and all similar platforms.

That is the intent of these platforms.

Shutting down all the public instances would likely be a game of whack-a-mole.

It is like playing whack-a-mole, but with a government mallet that's 5 miles in diameter.

You forgot the most important part: because it's pay to play, there will only ever be a half-dozen moles to whack if the project is successful, or one if it isn't.

Source: I used to run steemit.com.

I'd LOVE to hear some stories/experiences/lessons/rants :)

Maybe I could tip some steem, if i can locate my ancient wallet

As long as it is decentralised, the AWS thing shouldn't be a problem. It didn't seem to be for Diaspora.

That's true, as soon as a large enough group of people act offended by something, AWS and big tech are required to censor them, in case people get a bad case of the "WRONG" opinion.

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