Other people have mentioned this already, but in light of bills like this I am starting to get a little annoyed at people like Moxie and at people more broadly who seem to be purely interested in punching down on efforts to build sustainable, censorship-resistant encrypted platforms. People who want to argue that decentralized systems are pointless need to start offering feasible, multi-country legislative solutions alongside their criticism, or else I do not care about what they have to say.
Everything going on right now indicates to me that the UX problem is easier to solve than the legal problem. No, decentralized systems aren't perfect, they have significant challenges. But they are a way more promising field than anything Moxie is proposing, specifically because of bills like this. We have been fighting this battle for so long, and we have barely managed to stay on the winning side. But these bills are not going to go away, and in light of that I just do not believe that centralized Open platforms are sustainable.
There is no world where governments give up trying to gain control over a centralized communication platform.
So we just have to suck it up and figure out how to build good decentralized systems that ordinary people can use. We don't have an alternative. Yes, that's a very difficult challenge. But deal with it -- unless you have a better way to build an uncensorable Internet.
Everything going on right now indicates to me that the UX problem is easier to solve than the legal problem. No, decentralized systems aren't perfect, they have significant challenges. But they are a way more promising field than anything Moxie is proposing, specifically because of bills like this. We have been fighting this battle for so long, and we have barely managed to stay on the winning side. But these bills are not going to go away, and in light of that I just do not believe that centralized Open platforms are sustainable.
There is no world where governments give up trying to gain control over a centralized communication platform.
So we just have to suck it up and figure out how to build good decentralized systems that ordinary people can use. We don't have an alternative. Yes, that's a very difficult challenge. But deal with it -- unless you have a better way to build an uncensorable Internet.