Since forever. Newspaper, books, TV, Radio, postal services etc... all have a cost associated and all are selective in how, where and what they publish or deliver.
Everyone is trying to influence everyone else. The question is simply what degree and magnitude you are willing to accept.
You have a strange postal service. Where I live, the norm is that you put your letter in an envelope and it would be illegal for the postal service to open the envelope. If you pay the postage, your letter will be delivered, no matter what the content, and without any changes to the content.
There are a few exceptions, nevertheless, the postage itself is kept unopened. They're usually detected by specialized test equipment with very low false positive rates.
1) Explosives and biological agents. Likely detected by sniffers.
2) Radiological materials.
3) Heavy packages or letters may be opened and inspected, especially for customs purposes. Depends on the postal service.
4) Potentially xray may be applied.
None of this is really an obstacle to communication.
By the way, phone service is not censored or modified in most countries either. Including cellphones.
(1) and (2) do not really apply to letters (i.e., communication), (3) only applies when crossing borders, and then it's not the postal/delivery service that is opening the package, but customs, and (4) at least over here would be illegal, too, if it can be used to read the mail. Both opening/reading the mail that you are supposed to deliver as well as listening to phone calls going through your network is a criminal offence.
good luck with that one. check out the "postal wiretap"; don't think the government decided to build a "national" communications network for the fuck of it.
- e-mail (effectively a federated system, before it was cool)
- Mastodon
- a social network instance like Diaspora
- Matrix (matrix.org - "An open network for secure, decentralized communication.")
- XMPP / Jabber
- IRC (not federated, but self-hostable)
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I've been on Mastodon for the last 3-4 months and it's been awesome so far. It's basically Twitter without all the drama and toxicity. Also, while I don't run my own instance, I've seen many people running one.
If you like Mastodon, I'd recommend checking out SSB. It's completely peer-to-peer, you own your own data, you host the data of people you follow, and it's one of the best communities I've ever been a part of. Plus we have other sub-protocols like secret sharding for social password management and chess and other fun stuff. Super neat, I can't recommend it enough.
It took me a while to understand Mastodon. Although it's federated and you can mostly follow people on other instances, I finally realised that the advice they give you up front is good advice: pick an instance that has conversations you are interested in and join that one. I've been having lots of fun once I realised that it's less of a publishing platform and more of a place to chat with strangers that have similar interests to you.
ISP here: The difference is that a (properly run, ethical) ISP is actually neutral and is paid to carry the traffic. It's paying for a service just like paying $30 a month for a POTS phone line was in 1985. Building an ISP as an infrastructure service is a totally viable business model, it's not sexy like selling "big data" to advertisers as Facebook does, but it's a plain old fashioned exchange of money for basic services, just the same as you pay for your household electrical service, gas service, and water/sewer.
Running an ISP costs money just as any other critical infrastructure service is. If you get all the way down to the OSI layer 1 of it, it costs a lot of money. There's major construction projects involved. Go do the budgetary figures on what it would cost to acquire the right-of-way and run a new 864 count ribbon cable of dark fiber from Hillsboro, OR to Boise, ID, for example.
An ISP that doesn't fuck with its customers' traffic is simply a pipe to run your own choice of communications protocols on top of. The job of the ISP is to manage infrastructure at OSI layers 1-3, the 4-7 are your problem.
But the ISP isn't semantically involved in the communication, so it's technically trivial to build stuff on top that prevents manipulation--namely, to encrypt everything. Also, it's not an economical problem either, as ISPs do get paid by their customers, so there is no need of any sort for them to be semantically involved.
You and I can establish a TLS connection between us through our respective ISPs, and the ISPs have no clue what we are talking over that connection, nor can they change it. The worst thing they can do is to drop the packets.
I've been running my own MatterMost (a Slack clone) instance for a little while now. I've invited some close friends, a tiny bit of family, and colleagues I particularly appreciate. It's been fantastic so far. I decided to host it on a VPS because upload speed at home truly sucks, and hosting it locally wouldn't turn into a good experience for other users. Still, I own all the data. I've told all the other members that I do, and they're OK with it.
I bought a nice sounding domain name, got an SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt, and was good to go! My mental health has been increasing since then (no joke).
I like Signal. They don't store much of anything. Code is open. A friend got me onto it by one day going cold turkey off all his other messaging apps. It works. I Have tried that on some of my family.
True net neutrality would be a good start for addressing the ISP lines problem, though the complete solution would have to be some decentralized thing.
As a network engineer, this is part of why I tell junior neteng and NOC staff that there is definitely such as thing as ethics in network engineering. And train them on what constitutes ethical vs unethical behavior on the part of an ISP.
I'm fortunate enough to have admin rights over the infrastructure of a small to medium sized regional player, where the senior management are principled individuals who would not even contemplate doing bullshit like hijacking http or DNS traffic.
My personal thanks to you then! Teaching good ethics too people in a position where doing bad things would be relatively easy is really the way to go, in my opinion at least.
Well we're communicating here and it's not financed by people who want to manipulate us. There's the odd job ad but that's completely up front. When I bought Byte magazine I bought it partly for the ads. My choice - not really manipulation.
Everyone is trying to influence everyone else. The question is simply what degree and magnitude you are willing to accept.