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Comment by etherael | Hacker News Reader

A competitive market of third party providers on a peer to peer based social media platform can be both easy to use and impossible to censor. Censorship resistance becomes just another thing on the shopping list for third party providers, those that can do it best get the largest amount of users. The more censorship becomes a problem, the more value there is in services that resist it.

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Ordinary people do not do their "shopping" based on censorship resistance, and they never will. You're thinking like an activist, you need to think like an apathetic layman, because that's what the vast majority of human beings are. They simply do not care about the same things you do, and you can't force them to until their lives are directly impacted.

If you want to help ordinary people get around censorship, go help the Tor project. It actually works, because it's compatible with human nature. It provides a simple, largely transparent tool that people can insert into their existing, normal habits, and it provides a basis on which the technically sophisticated can build even better tools in the form of hidden services that users can interact with exactly as they interact with their existing, non-resistant tools.

> The more censorship becomes a problem, the more value there is in services that resist it.

That is, normal people can be negatively affected by state actions and censorship too, at the point that it is a problem, why would those ordinary people not do their shopping based on censorship resistance?

> If you want to help ordinary people get around censorship, go help the Tor project. It actually works, because it's compatible with human nature. It provides a simple, largely transparent tool that people can insert into their existing, normal habits, and it provides a basis on which the technically sophisticated can build even better tools in the form of hidden services that users can interact with exactly as they interact with their existing, non-resistant tools.

This is decent advice, but just serves to make my point all the more; Censorship resistance is becoming a problem in Turkey, people start using Tor. If the aforementioned peer to peer based social media platform actually existed, they would start using whatever service best evaded the censorship they're railing against now via Tor.

Since we have Tor already, why bother with such a platform? Because despite Tor, the platform itself could be hijacked and Tor would not assist in censorship resistance in this scenario. Twitter might be happy to tell Turkey to get lost when they start making demands, but what if you're trying to evade censorship from the US government or entity with similar level of power? This will likely become an issue in future, having platforms that are immune to hijacking is a good way to address it.

I invite you to waste your time. I'll not be wasting any more of mine on this absurd thread.

Fair enough, I don't care enough about social media to build such a platform at any rate, I just don't agree with your assertion that peer to peer systems involving key management are a lost cause.

Freenet[1] does actually have a decentralized social network plugin, sone[2]. It's not exactly user friendly, but at least it seems to prove that if people care about these things enough, they will use a solution even if it is difficult. By making the user experience simpler (less technical), one should be able to lower the bar significantly. It's worth noting that everything in the sone-guide[2] could be done automatically; freenet just isn't designed for simplicty.

[1]https://freenetproject.org

[2]http://freesocial.draketo.de/sone_en.html

If anything in this thread is absurd, it is your outright dismissal of the notion that users will ever change the status quo, using Tor of all things as your example.

If Tor can create an adequate UX for an onion router, why couldn't someone create a decent UX for a distributed secure messaging system?

Playing nknighthb's advocate, the point is, you can convince people to use Tor, because they are directly affected by the ban, without having to convince everyone who uses Twitter to use Tor, while you would have to convince everyone who uses Twitter to use your system instead, even the people who have no obvious reason for doing so.

This is a good point; people might see Tor as a one-time step they have to do to continue doing exactly what they did before, rather than a complete change to their digital routine. Still, I hope people keep building distributed alternatives; eventually someone might just get the right UX at the right time.

I normally wouldn't have been so harsh in my wording, especially when jumping into the middle of a thread, but I guess the words "waste" and "absurd" seemed hostile enough to set me off.

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