4 ms·

> What prevents the same thing from happening to decentralized services? Nothing, but at least knocking a server offline doesn't bring down the whole network,

• hiq 6y ago
  I don't think it's clear that a federated service has better chances against censorship. Take any federated service: if you ban the servers accounting for 90% of users, you end up in a situation mostly similar to censoring Signal, you need to migrate servers and accounts somehow. This should be easier for a centralized service (Signal) since they control everything. Banning servers that belong to n entities where n > 1 might be a bit more of a hurdle, but if n < 20 it's also not that much harder. Do we really expect that many prominent matrix servers, given how centralized email has ended up being? P2P on Matrix has been mentioned, and might be more resistant to censorship, but figuring out the UX in this case is pretty much an open problem (e.g. resetting your "address" whenever your reset your main device and lose your data is not acceptable). Also good to remember regarding centralized services: The Pirate Bay is still up and running. Will there be more pressure on Signal to close than The Pirate Bay?