It doesn’t have to be.
You could keep the general structure and functioning while improving privacy.
For example, by obfuscating post history, anonymous posting or assigning a user pseudonym per instance/community, auto-deleting old posts/comments. All optional features of course. Let instances/communites decide which of these features they want.
Keep the structure of Lemmy with it’s Reddit-like-ness and instances, but give users, instances and communities more control over data privacy.
Sure it’s harder to implement, you need some minimal-knowledge reputation system, but there is nothing fundamental preventing that from being possible.
The nice thing about federation is that one instance/community can stay the same data-leaking privacy mess, if they so prefer. While others could operate analogous to 4-chan (or anything in between).
A long time ago, like 5+ years ago shortly after release, I can’t say it impressed me. Neither when I periodically checked on it. Seems like is has significantly improved since then.
The issue is always whether or not I can sell it to my technically challenged friends and family. I don’t see those platforms taking over unless anyone can use them. Briar is sadly pretty lacking. Cwtch also seems interesting but I haven’t taken to time to check if it’s good yet.
I haven’t been that deeply immersed in the topic in the last 5+ years, but it seems like nothing much has changed. It’s still all the same players that seem to be interesting.
I would like something P2P like Briar to be the norm. But something federated like Matrix or DeltaChat would be nice too.
It should be P2P (like Torrent, not like Lemmy), routed through some anonymity layer like Tor or I2P so no one knows your IP, there should be no central point of failure, and of course I would love for it to have the same features, reliablility and speed as Signal or Telegram.
Closest I could find is Briar. It even works if the internet is down, which is nice. But it would be cooler if it worked with LoRA or something too.
I don’t know what would be most censorship resistant or technically capable of fully replacing modern messengers, but this here is a good list, anything that says ‘decentralized’:
I’d say if you are unfairly depriving someone of an audience that would have wanted to listen to you.
Individually blocking someone you don’t personally want to hear from obviously isn’t censorship.
But if you have a monopoly on a platform and block everyone who would be interested in listening to someone, just because of your personal preferences, that is censorship.
But if virtually no one wants to listen to something and you block it, I would argue that’s not censorship. E.g. no one should has to listen to spam or look at porn.
Of course those lines are blurry, but so is all of moral judgement.
It’s more clear cut if you ‘unrightfully’ ban someone from YouTube, since it’s a monopoly. Banning someone from lemmy.world who would have had an audience there is trickier, since ideally this would eventually lead to them and their audience moving to an instance where they are welcome.
That’s why you would want your government to protect speech, since it is the biggest and most powerful monopoly. But in my opinion the same should extend to any large institution, like social media.
And I’m talking about censorship as a moral judgement free term, since I would argue there is some good censorship. E.g. banning CSM. I don’t think it makes sense to call it anything other than it is.
check your most used apps here to see if they work with mircoG: plexus.techlore.tech
I’ve been using degoogled phones for years and I bareley have any issues. only issues are snapchat and google maps give warnings, but work. other google apps work fine.
It used to be you had to regularly do some convoluted workaround to get things working with microG, but that hasn’t been an issue for me for years now.
yeah the fp5 is expensive, but hardware wise it’s the first one I could actually see myself using as a daily driver. Considering that I’d probably use it for 3 years at least, the price isn’t that bad either. However, I’d love to have a folding phone instead, but I’m pretty sure it’ll take a few years until good degoogled roms are available for those. so yeah fp5 seems like a good transistionary device.
Really, I would want a web 10.0 that enforces anonymity, privacy and good UX by design by restricting what features “web” developers can use to a minimum nescessary set. And ideally it would all be P2P or at least some form of decentralized. Like if Tor, I2P, Zeronet and the Fediverse had a baby.
You could do 99% of all the things you might want to do on it as a user on a daily basis. You could have a search engine, a wikipedia, a facebook, a reddit, a youtube, etc and whatever else people use the internet for 99% of the time, but the features of this Web 10.0 are restricted to only the minimum ones to enable those sites. And the only way to be tracked is if you intentionally or unintentionally reveal your own identity.
Then you might also have hardware that exclusively only connects to this Web 10.0, ideally on a hardware level.
That would be the dream.
Presumably they canonicalize the data coming out of the orb in some way, so you get the same number/ID out every time you use it. For example, you can represent molecules as many different strings (like C=CC or CC=C for propane) and you would want a canonicalization method to give you the same string every time for the same molecule.
They might have some machine learning algorithm that is trained on the sensor data as an input and for the output they try to maximize distance between different people in some high dimensional vectorspace, while preserving a sense of similarity between similar people. So then after training the model, you put in the sensor data and you get out some 1069 dimensional vector oht that represents you. Kind of how word embeddings work, that they use for AI.
Then they take that vector and “round” that vector to get the same result every time. Like one time it might be (1.775, … 2.854, 11.631) and another time it might be (1.777, … 2.863, 11.625), so they just round it to (1, … 2, 11), so they get the same vector 99.999% of the time you use the device.
Or like some more clever scheme instead of literally rounding. Perhaps another NN.
That’s how I would do it anyway.
So that way they avoid a user registering multiple IDs, because the device will reject your new ID request if your vector is already found on record.
Then they hash it in some way so your biometric data can’t be reconstructed and store it on the blockchain. That or maybe they do some RSA like voodo magic like with Monero.
So that’s why all data can be deleted on the device, because they destill it down into your unique biometric fingerprint that comes out the same every time, ideally.
That’s just what I’d expect them to do anyway.
I’m not quite sure where the zero-knowledge proofs come in, but they are pretty cool in theory. They allow you to do things like knowing the result of a vote without knowing what everyone voted for.
Also im not quite sure if it’s just a human verification system or an ID system. Those are two very different beasts. One would literally just tell anyone who’s asking if you are a human or not, the other would tell them your ID for tracking.
Perhaps they use zero-knowledge proofs to avoid storing IDs publicly on the blockchain? That would be pretty cool.
If it really is just a human verification system and I am correct in how it works, I don’t see much problems with the protocol privacy wise. We will need such a system anyway because of AI. It is unavoidable.
Since we have no choice (except return to monkey) you would hope it to be as accurate, hard to crack, private, secure, decentralized, FOSS as possible.
I don’t think WorldCoin and their Orb are FOSS or decentralized. So that’s a huge red flag for abuse. They could just in hardware send your unique ID to some malicious actor. Aside from all the possible software backdoors, exploits etc…
But as bad as systems like that could be, it seemy pretty alright, all things considering.
What is their approach to biometrics with blockchain? Do they just dump your data on the blockchain for everyone to see, like Bitcoin? You would assume it is at least hashed.
Or is it encrypted so that only someone with the corresponding key can use it to prove your identiy? In this scenario they couldn’t verify your identity without your consent. But also then you would always have your key with you at all times, so I doubt they went this route.
It’s probably just hashed and public, is it?
That’s the point of the repuation system.
It’s a very hard problem, I’ll give you that.
What you need is, each instance and community collects reputation in the federation. then users posting on those instances can collect reputation on those. basically by not being banned or massively downvoted. Your reputation is weighted by the reputation of each you collected it from instance.
Each users identity is tied to some key that collects reputation, that you generate new identities from from for each instance/community/post. Like how some credit card services give you a new credit card number for each new website.
Admins don’t know who you are, but they can see and verify your reputation.
Then instance/community admins can decide if they want a different weighting. For example, to completely disregard the reputation by some instance or make one you like 10x more important.
You could get an ordered list of posts or pseudonymous users based on the reputation. Untrustworthy users will glow like a christmas tree.
That would be one way to do it. It’s hard to make it water tight, but any improvements would be better than the current fediworse.