in the situation you describe, or any urgent situation where speed of communication is paramount, what about bombardment through multiple channels? like, i'll often leave my phone out of my pocket, and not pay super close attention to it. and if it lights up with one text message, or one signal message, or whatever, i might not look at it. but if it's buzzing like crazy, or someone starts calling, i'd pick it up.

i guess what i'm saying is, "urgent" to me means signal/text/call/call someone that might be around the person/whatever, until the message gets through. if something is urgent, i would not send it solely by text. i've certainly had SMS messages get dropped or delayed many many times over the years.

can you really only use one messaging app at a time? signal is my primary messaging app, but i don't really find it bothersome to use whatsapp and regular SMS also. different people i communicate with prefer different channels, and often the same person will use different channels with me depending on the purpose (e.g., my dad mostly chats with me by SMS, and most of my immediate family's group chat is on SMS, but when my dad is texting with me about some sensitive personal financial info, it's over signal).

also, i hope that whatever the urgent issue was, it was resolved in an ok way. like i said, not trying to shortchange the urgency of a medical emergency or second guess your decision making or frustration at the time.

Of course, I'm not hosting my own server, so I am in some way in the hands of its administrator, just like I was in the hands of Google when I used G+. However, I can talk to him directly, which is a huge benefit. Also, if he decides to shut down the server, I can still join a different instance and reconnect with all the people I was following on the old server.

The point is not that you user are being censored, but that twitter "lies" to you about social dynamics with their obvious (yet hidden) biases.

Twitter promotes the extremes and hides the middle. If this is not enough they also apply a consistent political agenda (by protecting their main cash cow of liberal journalist) and lie about it.

Perfect example is what happened with the Convington kids and journalist calling for doxxing.

Also this is a FINE example of why niche communities need unbiased online infrastructure. A casual google-searcher may judge them by whatever google's AI decides is representative of the group, and choose not to deal with them at all.

For other differing rules, instaces generally silence from the federated timeline. Eg: I can still follow Humblr.social and Sinblr users, but Federated timeline users won't have to drown in porn if the admin silences the server.

I'd say most users won't type "mastodon.com" in their "browsers". They will type "mastodon" in their "internet" or, if technically savvy, into Google first. Second, from following the fediverse (not just mastodon, but also pixelfed, peertube etc), i have a feeling that they aren't into mainstream, general audience anyway. A lot of them are small focused instances and as such, won't even be attracting new people via Google, but by invites anyway. Many instances have closed registration anyway. So if you need to land anywhere it's likely not on mastodon.social, but something like ...(checks last five accounts to post directly on top of timeline): icosahedron.website, fostodon.org, mastodon.social, mastodon.technology (my instance) and hackers.town.

You make a good point about how many users will simply Google the name, which naturally opens the question about whether users will want to scroll past info on the band & prehistoric animal before finding the service.

Take a look at https://keybase.io/anthonyclarka2/sigchain

You can see a whole bunch of extra crypto is being used to verify the information.

It comes with some issues, namely that I suck at keeping it up to date and that not all identities I would like to list there have a way for me to provide proof beyond my word alone. For most use cases and attack vectors I consider this sufficient enough. Now this is outside most peoples' threat models, but Keybase also provides some mitigation against some other scenarios.

1) If nadyanay.me becomes compromised the imposter could update /identities.html with a new and fake list and I would need to update my link everywhere it is used or I would be pointing people to the imposter list. I have more faith in both (a) Keybase is less likely to be compromised and (b) in the event Keybase has become compromised someone will notice. Nobody would notice if my personal site was compromised, as even my closest friends don't regularly browse my website. It could honestly take weeks or even months to discover the file had been changed.

2) A person who compromises my account(s) must also have access to my private key in order to sign messages in my name. This is important because even if any of my accounts is compromised they're still unable to prove they are me if asked. This is something I actively practice with a few online friends of mine. We pretty regularly lend large sums of (virtual) game cash to one another worth in the range of $10,000-$15,000 USD if RWT'd. The last thing either of us would want is an imposter asking to borrow some money in-game from them and selling it off and so anytime we ask to borrow some in-game cash we ask to see a signed message. I admit that's the primary reason behind most of my signed messages...

3) Any attempts at creating a new key will allow users to see that my key has been revoked and replaced. Users who had signed my old key would need to re-verify with me that my new key is valid. Social engineering and people's casual use cases means the imposter would just claim to be me and most people would believe them. Few would bother verifying but it at least provides an additional opportunity for the imposter to be outed.

The post I replied to was singing the praises of decentralisation, as if the idea that nobody can control what's said and done is a universal positive. I'm just putting across the counterpoint that it's not, there are circumstances where unilateral control could be (and is, by large sections of the population) seen as a good thing.

> You cannot outlaw a technology (or require a backdoor) simply because it may not support deletion as a feature by virtue of being decentralized.

I mean, you can. I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing to do, but there's no real reason a government couldn't make exactly such a rule. Whether it could be enforceable in any way is a different matter.

I've seen darknets (or a P2P networks) which were hard to censor (Tor) but also where you could influence via supply and demand (Freenet, IPFS).

Why are you trying to paint this as an extremist position? Perhaps we are misunderstanding each other. Any removal of content is not censorship and that position is clearly nonsense. E.g. a commercial entity can do what it wants with its own property, including removing content.

What is universally negative is requiring all future technologies to have loopholes through which things can be deleted, thereby preventing some designs outright. I think this parent comment sums it up quite nicely why having such systems is something very reasonable and desirable:

> On the other hand, (at least some) end-users see decentralisation as a huge benefit, and at least in my case it gives me confidence that the whim of a single company can't ruin the experience for me, or even take away the platform altogether.

I'm not saying you should abandon decentralisation efforts if that's your thing, I'm just saying don't expect the world to flock to (or praise) what you create. Censorship resistance is not seen as a universal good.

> Of course people are going to get behind the idea of preventing teen suicides, particularly when it seems that the solution might be preventing a huge, corporate giant do as it pleases.

The criticism is usually that not enough was done to police the harassment. Decentralised systems are likely to make that worse.

also i find the "rabbit hole" metaphor and a username beginning with "dbased" to be pretty "on the nose" in the context of this thread (sorry, i couldn't resist any of that, and i only realized i ended with a pun after typing it out).

Why/how? I truly do not see why it is exaggerated: I did mean to talk about an edge case and I'm not saying we are exclusively dealing with that edge case today. However, being prepared for this edge case and having a viable alternative seems extremely important.