| > I've been running my own mail server since 1995, and I would not wish it on anyone. Yes but Internet still young and evolving. Here are modern solutions : 1) https://yunohost.org
2) http://cozy.io
3) https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
4) http://modoboa.org And even if everyone won't selfhost one's email or XMPP service, by owning one's domain name (DNS or GNS) he-she can switch from an hosting service to an other. And by owning one's own domain name, he-she wont loose contact with his-her social network. GNS is a good decentralize solution by separating name-identifier-locator https://gnunet.org/gns We have to switch from old email-JID semantic user@host to the new one greeting@name and this is not a technical change https://linuxfr.org/users/apichat/journaux/salut-toto-saluta... > If your idea is that every time a host gets blocked, everyone could move to a new one and somehow rediscover their entire social network, it would be way easier just to use a centralized service and access it with different VPNs as they are successively blocked instead. This look like a joke. How many VPNs providers is there ? Won't be blocked ? The only thing you've done is post-pone the problem and save your centralize enclosing business. With Signal and WhatsApp and other centralizes and enclosing social network precisely you have to rebuild your entire social network when the service go bankrupt / go wrong way or don't evolved / is compromize by intelligence agencies and law / is blocked. Switching from Signal to WhatsAPP is very expansive because you need to rebuilt your social because you don't own your Internet name (DSN or GNS) nor a conversation address with the semantic greeting@name. 1) actuality this is not true and even if it was it could evolve. A google-centric world is not the end of history. 2) XMPP is an evolution of email and it solve many metadata and data protection problems. Conversations is a good modern solution https://conversations.im With Snowden revelations and the GAFAM domination many people do hard work to solve those problems, for example the IETF. It looks like you don't want to solve those problems because you want Signal to become a S for GAFAMS. 3) "blocking 100 or 1000 hosts is no more difficult than blocking one." Yes it is more difficult because censors have to discover all these hosts. They don't already now them. Big centralize and enclose social networks as Signal, Facebook or Gmail addresses with semantic user@host are gifts to censors and Intelligence agencies. We've saw it with Prism. Finally is there perfect technical solutions for political problems ? No, no one is perfect, no one can solved political problems. But some of them are better than other, some make more difficult to censor and spy everybody. Big centralize solutions are the worst and are not "Internet" solutions but they are 20th century "Minitel" Telco bad solutions. |
It's not and you don't, because your entire social graph is on your phone, in your address book. That's precisely the point. As the identifiers and contact lists are owned by the users and not by the messaging service providers, switching between messaging services (taking your social graph with you) is about as easy as it gets. See https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/