[AnthonyMouse]

> Ultimately, anonymity is an anti-pattern in the same way that the hot new zero-trust stuff is in the blockchain world. Humans, social beings that they are, fundamentally operate on trust, which fundamentally requires identification. Removing either of those creates more problems than it solves.

Quite the opposite. Forced identification is an instrument of fascism. There is a reason the phrase "papers, please" is associated with the villains.

Communities can then be layered on top. But even there, what you need is a persistent identifier with which to build a reputation, not a government tracking number with which to be extracted from your bed at 4AM and shipped off to a prison cell if you're accused of crimethink.

The talk of "community standards" gets to the root of it. To have community standards you have to have a community, and each community will have its own standards. Which means the standards belong in the community and not in a generic protocol at the core of the network used by diverse communities with mutually incompatible ideals.

[indigochill]

I think we're agreeing.

> But even there, what you need is a persistent identifier with which to build a reputation, not a government tracking number

The persistent identifier is all I mean. I agree that tying it to a government-issued identification is problematic since it then gives the government the administration/moderation power. As long as there is a persistent identifier (and one the community owns so it can take meaningful moderation/administration action when necessary), then we're good.

By "anonymity" I mean the absence of a persistent identifier (for example, someone uploading something to BitTorrent is anonymous by default, as far as I know).

> To have community standards you have to have a community, and each community will have its own standards. Which means the standards belong in the community

Also agree with this. This is where federation really shines in my book, as it lets each community apply its own standards while also enabling networking across communities with sufficiently compatible ideals while retaining the autonomy of each community.

[ArneBab]

Most communication tools in the original Freenet nowadays have persistent identifiers, because the experience within Freenet showed that not having any moderation causes constructive communication to break down.

The experience there proves that the methods used there for decentralized moderation succeeded at keeping communication friendly without centralized power or forced identification.

For more background see https://www.draketo.de/software/decentralized-moderation

[AnthonyMouse]

> As long as there is a persistent identifier (and one the community owns so it can take meaningful moderation/administration action when necessary), then we're good.

> By "anonymity" I mean the absence of a persistent identifier (for example, someone uploading something to BitTorrent is anonymous by default, as far as I know).

But these are separate layers. It's the same way that HTTP or TCP is "anonymous" in the sense that it doesn't assign any names to users (and anybody can connect to the coffee house Wi-Fi or use a VPN etc.), but Reddit (which uses HTTP and TCP) has usernames.

A P2P content-addressable storage system can be "anonymous" and it's not a problem, because all it's doing is hosting raw data. Then you build a P2P Reddit on top of it that has human moderation etc., but that's a separate thing made by separate people, and there could be arbitrarily many of them because they're not fused together.

It's like Netflix and Hulu could both use BitTorrent in the same way that PeerTube does, even though they're independent competitors. The main reason they don't is that Hollywood wants to hold out the pretense that using BitTorrent is some kind of dishonorable activity, not that there is anything actually unsuitable about it.

> This is where federation really shines in my book, as it lets each community apply its own standards while also enabling networking across communities with sufficiently compatible ideals while retaining the autonomy of each community.

A lot of the existing protocols are poorly designed around this though. Like one of the big problems on Mastodon is that users have a "home instance" and can't migrate from it, but then a lot of big instances don't federate with other instances by default, and if your instance dies then your account goes with it. This also makes it impossible for a user to use one account for everything, because there isn't necessarily any instance that federates with all of the communities the user wants to participate in. But since users will want that, and large instances will want dominance and can achieve it by not federating with small instances, it's a centralizing force that encourages the Gmail-ification of the system.

What you want is many diverse communities that anybody can fluidly move between and participate in simultaneously, not recreating the status quo and calling it a distributed system.