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quandyalaterreux OP wrote

Yes, as his employee Joshua Lund says,

An aspiring censor could also "easily connect to the broader network" and masquerade as a federated server in order to discover others. This process could even be automated.

Federated services also require an identifier, and this identifier usually indicates where the user's account is located and how to connect with them (e.g. [email protected]). As people share these identifiers, the aspiring censor can just keep adding new entries to the blacklist.

Federated services also offer no by design solution to metadata.

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throwaway38yyzew wrote (edited )

Throwaway here, this affects many other FOSS projects like the Tor Browser which has a high usage meek-amazon pluggable transport. It's really sad to see that the Russia block of Telegram and another app (which apparently relies on Amazon) gave the financial incentive to Amazon to drop support for this (Russia blocked a ton of Amazon's IPs). As you can see yet again, capitalism in action. Sad.

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quandyalaterreux OP wrote

Federated protocol: you have to keep banning IPs

That's something very easy for censors. I mean just look at the Tor Project's bridge distribution, even though there are loads of non-public bridges, China is able to keep up and block virtually all of them. But, domain fronting works in China.

Non-federated protocol: your mobile phone number, which is associated with your real name, is your ID

Federated protocol: your account on a server is your ID

I agree, a phone number isn't the best thing, but a federated protocol is worse since you're giving more metadata by associating your account with a particular instance (e.g. [email protected]).

I don't see how is non-federated better. Best case scenario, they are equally bad.

I think Moxie did a pretty convincing case against it: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

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surreal wrote

wow Amazon are fking idiots, who knew.

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