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Comment by fluoridation | Hacker News Reader

>I think to maintain any sort of real open web, we're going to need some sort of new Tor network that can support billions of users anonymously accessing information which can't be deplatformed

That already exists. They're called onion sites. What we really need is something that performs about as well as the current Internet, but is stronger against deplatforming: decentralized DNS. It doesn't even need to give memorable names like DNS does, it just needs to be a second, stable addressing layer on top of IP so clients can always find the server.

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Unfortunately three letter agencies are going after exit node operators and threatening them in pretty fucked up ways. I think there's also likely some issues with very wide spread use of government owned nodes to be able to deanonymize people

What makes you think an alternative implementation of a deanonymization network wouldn't have the exact same problem?

there are ways of having privacy preserving communication/web browsing that are designed differently than Tor. Freenet is example.

Decentralization just puts people that run servers as middle men to further impose a censorship agenda with ActivityPub.

Whatever it is it needs to be distributed like BitTorrent.

>Decentralization just puts people that run servers as middle men to further impose a censorship agenda with ActivityPub.

Name lookup is not like a social media feed. If a server is censoring, say, TPB, it's plainly obvious, because you'll go to the IP and not get the content you expected. Just move on to the next server on the list until you find one with the up-to-date information.

>Whatever it is it needs to be distributed like BitTorrent.

DNS is already a distributed system like BitTorrent. When you publish an IP update you do it to a single node, which then propagates through the network. The deplatforming problem of DNS is that name assignment is something only central authorities can grant and revoke.

It also makes it very difficult to censor. There is 1 YouTube and thousands of ActivityPub servers and relays that would happily carry all posts through the fediverse regardless if they seize one or two hosts. There are other options as well - that was a bit my point that Medium/X/Bluesky/YouTube - these are designed to harvest engagement in exchange for content. They’re not good for news and certainly not good as an archive.

In theory yes, but in practice, most of the traffic will gravitate to popular servers and the popular ones will be targeted by people that want to censor content and force the gatekeepers to silence content. The ones that don't play along wont matter because they are not that visible.

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