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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

What a surprise, IIRC in Hong Kong there was a platform that was fully decentralized. HK protesters used it on their phones during their uprising and China could not block it.

Maybe it is time people move to that. Sadly I forgot its name or where to get it. Of course the app stores could block that too.

There is always USENET I guess. I wonder if there are apps on Cell Phones that can access USENET and format the posts to work with the small screens. And of course reformat posts to comply to USENET formatting requirements (ie: wordwrap at Col 70).

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> Sadly I forgot its name or where to get it.

Are you thinking of HKmap.live?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HKmap.live

> Of course the app stores could block that too.

And Apple did.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49995688

Bridgefy, Firechat, Bitchat and other bluetooth/wifi peer-to-peer SoMe's are great as long as you're enough people around. As long as you don't rely on one of the big tech app stores (or use an iPhone), it's not hard to get them even when the government is being tyrannical. It would be interesting to build something that would work over the various IoT networks which basically span all of Europe, but I guess that would be hard in countries where there are large areas of "nothing". It also depends on farmers choosing open source technology for their tech since you'd need a lot of farming IoT equipment to connect cross rural areas.

> It would be interesting to build something that would work over the various IoT networks which basically span all of Europe, but I guess that would be hard in countries where there are large areas of "nothing".

A portable device that could effortless hook up to the existing decentralized wireless networks would be even better, Freifunk covers large part of Germany, Guifi covers large parts of Spain, probably there are more somewhere else too, but AFAIK there is no portable device that lets you easily just connect and chat, still requires a bit of setup to participate.

A centralized platform with marginally cleverer cryptography can technically allow posts and comments to belong to a user, but not be traceable back to the user! When asked by the government who made a particular post or comment, it should not be possible for the platform to readily identify who made it. Of course the IP address should not be tracked either, certainly not beyond 1h. The logged in user would still be able to view and manage all of their posts and comments, also see responses, because they would have the cryptography key to do so. So what about spam and guardrail control -- one solution is to let AI classify it. Much more can be possible with cleverer uses of cryptography. In short, it is not formally necessary to switch to a decentralized or federated solution to address the anonymity issue.

Why not just set the author ID to null?

The issue with that is that the author won't be able to edit or delete the message at any time. These are useful requirements. On Reddit I sometimes edit a message after several years, so there shouldn't be a time limit either.

Anything that is P2P E2EE is hard to block by utilizing traditional measures. Personally I use and trust Tox. If you also want anonimity you can pair it with tor.

All apple has to do is remove it from the app store. Doesn't matter how P2P or E2EE it is.

> Of course the app stores could block that

That is the problem with technical solutions. Governments can ban them, or mandate on device scanning to monitor your usage.

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