> Maybe we'd all have been better off on Google Plus. Haha, probably not. G+ enforced a "real names" policy, then tried to merge accounts across search, YouTu

> Maybe we'd all have been better off on Google Plus. Haha, probably not. G+ enforced a "real names" policy, then tried to merge accounts across search, YouTube, etc. It's the same Panopticon, though slightly less amoral. If we want to solve this, we need to make it easier for non-tech people to decentralize their data. Distributed communication was solved long ago: email (private 1-1), mailing lists (private many-many), weblogs (public 1-many), Usenet (public many-many). All of this can be self-hosted, or hosted on a shared server for a few $/mo, i.e. less than 10% of your phone bill. Since that will never happen, the least-bad way to do this is to silo your online activity among separate entities and identities.