Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

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Ha, looks like I missed a 2023 drama when the original Freenet was renamed to Hyphanet, and Locutus became Freenet (https://www.hyphanet.org/freenet-renamed-to-hyphanet.html; https://freenet.org/faq/#how-do-the-previous-and-current-ver...)

I used to check out the original version a few times in the past. I loved the overall premise of a uncensored network (for the context: I lived in an authoritorian country that doubled down on censoring online communications), but no system I've tried out (Freenet, ZeroNet, I2P, Tor) grew on me. Too much, uh, weird stuff (or worse), while interesting content was pretty sparse. And I don't produce anything worthy of sharing myself.

The tech could be there, but the society is not. [Not] surprisingly, the social demand seems to be all focused on to work around the Internet censorship with very limited interest in bootstrapping something that would be resistant. At scale, humans always pick the cheapest/lowest-effort option, even if it's obviously sub-optimal and even if it leads nowhere we want (or so I think) to be.

The new Freenet (formerly Locutus) is more of a communication than a storage medium, which should make it less susceptible to the kind of problems you're referring to. That said, even on Hyphanet you really need to look for something bad to find it as the default indexes are curated.

We’re also developing a decentralized reputation system based on the "web of trust" concept. This system is intended to help filter out antisocial content—like spam or worse—without relying on any central authority.

This was my experience with matrix.org, mostly pedos and far right extremists or other weird anti social characters . Turned me off from these kinds of platforms big time.

if you’re talking about the matrix.org homeserver’s room directory - these rooms are strictly against our terms of use (section 6 of https://matrix.org/legal/terms-and-conditions/) and we shut them down, and these days have even frozen the roomdir to stop them appearing.

if you’re talking about the wider network - yes, there’s a subset of abusive users… just like on the web, or the internet, or email, etc. Unfortunately there’s nothing we can do about; it comes with the territory of being an open network where anyone can participate.

My experience of Matrix is more that it’s full of FOSS projects like Mozilla, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, GNOME, KDE etc… as well as lots of government users. But ymmv. If you are still seeing abusive rooms as a matter of course, please route details to abuse@matrix.org, where we do actually act on them (if they are on servers we control)

Wow, yeah the parent comment is shocking to me. For me matrix is OSS discussions, like a modern IRC (not that IRC is gone, a lot of matrix rooms bridge to IRC).

Though I suppose if you search for other stuff you can find it.

Though it strikes me as a little odd, I never really associated matrix with anonymity, more with federation, end to end encryption, self hosting.

Perhaps hosting matrix servers as tor hidden services could serve that purpose.

It's a bit strange to even criticize these services for the existence of abusive users. The underlying problem is that abusive people exist in real life: it goes without saying that they'll show up in any context that's accessible to the general public.

Complaining that bad people are using Matrix is about as meaningful as complaining that bad people are driving on the highways or are filling their bathtubs with from the local water supply.

I only ever use a half dozen or so public Matrix rooms (I mostly use it for private chat) but my experience in those is nothing like you describe. Unsavory characters occasionally wander in, just as they do on every other public forum I've used, but they are shown to the door and the normal conversation carries on without them.

I wonder how someone must be using the platform, or how they're looking for rooms that might interest them, to get the impression that it's "mostly pedos and far right extremists or other weird anti social characters."

No need to imply hostility like that, it could just have been a factor of when they tried it.

No hostility implied or intended.

if every bar in town bans nazis or punks, even if the last bar has high minded ideals you kinda know which clientele they'll get

I visited matrix.org once and I somehow only stumbled into the high minded clientele.

I haven't seen any pedos or far-right extremists. Quite the contrary really

Those people also use the public roads. Are you also turned off from driving on public roads?

To be fair, everyone with a commute who had or has to sit in endless traffic is turned off from driving on public roads and wishes there were fewer vehicles or that they were the only one on the road.

Paraphrased, "I was driving home, stuck in traffic, and this thought occurred to me, now I know this is bad, but I thought, if half of everyone in this city died, I'd be home by now." - Paul Reiser

When combined with "You aren't stuck in traffic, you are the traffic", the two quotes sum to "Go kill yourself."

Darker than mine, nice.

They'd need to specifically die in their own homes (or otherwise not on the roads), or else the resulting traffic jams would make your drive home even longer.

"What about..."? Isn't a very convincing form of argument in general and in this case it's particularly specious. When using the public roads, people's unsavory/illegal behaviour with respect to images (for example) isn't something that affects other road users, but if you're using a chat application an innocent user may well see/download content that cannot be unseen and is a crime to download (even innocently).

In that context the decision to avoid a chat application if you feel it is likely to put you at unnecessary risk where there are alternatives that will not is perfectly reasonable.

I don't mind "eccentric" personalities in my online spaces. I hate people trying to restrict online freedom more. To a degree that I think the threat of far-right people is pretty miniscule in comparison, but people allegedly trying to combat them let themselves be driven by fear. And the result is usually as bad as you could expect.

There are a lot of excuses for bad policy with the deflection of "at least I am not a far-right unperson".

A chat application usually cannot put me in any risk at all. Public personas might have different problems here, but the rules of PR aren't that new and these cases build a poor general case.

Fair to have the choice of a supervised chat app as long as people don't try to enforce all chat apps to adhere to arbitrary rules due to the latest outrage or panic over certain people, opinions, politics, bubble tea or whatever can be the source of ire.

The solution to this, at least in the case of Tor, is for existing sites (e.g., Wordpress, medium, etc…) to provide one-click onion-site publishing support.

I don’t think it’s a technical problem. Hosting or accessing a site on distributed networks is no more complicated than running or hosting a VPN (e.g. https://novayagazeta.eu/vpnovaya), and organizations host them just fine, and layman people were proven to be capable of setting up client software when they were forced to (e.g. Instagram or YouTube bans in Russia).

I see it as a more of a chicken-and-egg issue. Publishers don’t come because there’s no audience, audience doesn’t come because there are no publishers. Plus, there is no recognition of distributed networks as a solution to censorship - the current non-enthusiast view of them ranges from “haven’t heard about it” through “tried it, found it useless” all the way to “it’s only for pedos and nazis”, which is extremely harmful for any meaningful and socially beneficial adoption, of course.

I’m not sure if those are the actual reasons. Certainly not a technical issue, though.

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