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That doesn't necessarily mean you've lost, take cryptocurrencies for example. Yes you can manage your own keys as an end user for your cryptocurrency holdings,

That doesn't necessarily mean you've lost, take cryptocurrencies for example. Yes you can manage your own keys as an end user for your cryptocurrency holdings, but as you say most end users will prefer to work through a third party that will handle the complexities of key management for them. The trick is though that there can be an infinite amount of third parties all engaged in competition with each other and the end users just participate in that market like they would any other. OP's suggestion may well work the same way, certain end users could choose to handle their own key management, and there could be third parties that handle it for those that prefer not to. As long as the space for those third parties is infinite and end users can opt to handle key management themselves, it's still a decentralised solution.

nknighthb 13y ago
This is not a technical problem. It is a human problem, and humans don't act like you want them to. There would emerge a handful of large, popular, simple, easy-to-use central sites. A rogue regime can block them just as easily as it just blocked Twitter. When it takes hours, days, or weeks for new moles to pop up, and they necessarily stay up, Whack-A-Mole is easy. And as sites keep getting whacked, people will lose the motivation to move on to yet another new site, learn its quirks, and rebuild their network. Twitter is a powerful tool of dissent precisely because everyone uses it. It's not limited to the technically sophisticated and/or motivated activists. Activists need access to regular people, and they won't have it on a network that's painful and annoying to use.
- etherael 13y ago
  A competitive market of third party providers on a peer to peer based social media platform can be both easy to use and impossible to censor. Censorship resistance becomes just another thing on the shopping list for third party providers, those that can do it best get the largest amount of users. The more censorship becomes a problem, the more value there is in services that resist it.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    Ordinary people do not do their "shopping" based on censorship resistance, and they never will. You're thinking like an activist, you need to think like an apathetic layman, because that's what the vast majority of human beings are. They simply do not care about the same things you do, and you can't force them to until their lives are directly impacted. If you want to help ordinary people get around censorship, go help the Tor project. It actually works, because it's compatible with human nature. It provides a simple, largely transparent tool that people can insert into their existing, normal habits, and it provides a basis on which the technically sophisticated can build even better tools in the form of hidden services that users can interact with exactly as they interact with their existing, non-resistant tools.
    - etherael 13y ago
      > The more censorship becomes a problem, the more value there is in services that resist it. That is, normal people can be negatively affected by state actions and censorship too, at the point that it is a problem, why would those ordinary people not do their shopping based on censorship resistance? > If you want to help ordinary people get around censorship, go help the Tor project. It actually works, because it's compatible with human nature. It provides a simple, largely transparent tool that people can insert into their existing, normal habits, and it provides a basis on which the technically sophisticated can build even better tools in the form of hidden services that users can interact with exactly as they interact with their existing, non-resistant tools. This is decent advice, but just serves to make my point all the more; Censorship resistance is becoming a problem in Turkey, people start using Tor. If the aforementioned peer to peer based social media platform actually existed, they would start using whatever service best evaded the censorship they're railing against now via Tor. Since we have Tor already, why bother with such a platform? Because despite Tor, the platform itself could be hijacked and Tor would not assist in censorship resistance in this scenario. Twitter might be happy to tell Turkey to get lost when they start making demands, but what if you're trying to evade censorship from the US government or entity with similar level of power? This will likely become an issue in future, having platforms that are immune to hijacking is a good way to address it.
- peterkelly 13y ago
  What I had in mind was something that would operate in a peer-to-peer fashion similar to bittorrent, and everyone who uses it would install an app to use it. If people only or mainly used web-based frontends it would be unlikely to work well. Also in response to the earlier comment: the app could provide a friendly interface for generating keys which doesn't require the user to know the technical details. They would just have an "identity file" that would be stored on the app, with options to copy it to a usb stick etc. Additional paragraph which seems to be cut off from all comments.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    > everyone who uses it would install an app to use it Exactly. Meaning you must have key management. > Also in response to the earlier comment: the app could provide a friendly interface for generating keys which doesn't require the user to know the technical details. They would just have an "identity file" that would be stored on the app, with options to copy it to a usb stick etc. You are repeating history. PGP and many similar products have provided exactly this for end-user encryption of email for more than two decades. Not one has gained mass adoption. You cannot make a system that relies on the user to understand anything at all about key management, no matter how friendly the interface. "I will write a new program that makes email encryption easy!" has long been a joke/cliche. Key management is a problem that must be addressed with something more substantive than just yet another new interface tacked on top of the same old ideas. I can't even get intelligent developers to manage SSH keys properly. They lose them constantly, or forget their passphrases (if I can even get them to use a passphrase). There is absolutely no hope of making a service anywhere near as popular as Twitter that adds the friction of key management.

nknighthb 13y ago

This is not a technical problem. It is a human problem, and humans don't act like you want them to. There would emerge a handful of large, popular, simple, easy-to-use central sites. A rogue regime can block them just as easily as it just blocked Twitter. When it takes hours, days, or weeks for new moles to pop up, and they necessarily stay up, Whack-A-Mole is easy. And as sites keep getting whacked, people will lose the motivation to move on to yet another new site, learn its quirks, and rebuild their network. Twitter is a powerful tool of dissent precisely because everyone uses it. It's not limited to the technically sophisticated and/or motivated activists. Activists need access to regular people, and they won't have it on a network that's painful and annoying to use.

etherael 13y ago
A competitive market of third party providers on a peer to peer based social media platform can be both easy to use and impossible to censor. Censorship resistance becomes just another thing on the shopping list for third party providers, those that can do it best get the largest amount of users. The more censorship becomes a problem, the more value there is in services that resist it.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  Ordinary people do not do their "shopping" based on censorship resistance, and they never will. You're thinking like an activist, you need to think like an apathetic layman, because that's what the vast majority of human beings are. They simply do not care about the same things you do, and you can't force them to until their lives are directly impacted. If you want to help ordinary people get around censorship, go help the Tor project. It actually works, because it's compatible with human nature. It provides a simple, largely transparent tool that people can insert into their existing, normal habits, and it provides a basis on which the technically sophisticated can build even better tools in the form of hidden services that users can interact with exactly as they interact with their existing, non-resistant tools.
  - etherael 13y ago
    > The more censorship becomes a problem, the more value there is in services that resist it. That is, normal people can be negatively affected by state actions and censorship too, at the point that it is a problem, why would those ordinary people not do their shopping based on censorship resistance? > If you want to help ordinary people get around censorship, go help the Tor project. It actually works, because it's compatible with human nature. It provides a simple, largely transparent tool that people can insert into their existing, normal habits, and it provides a basis on which the technically sophisticated can build even better tools in the form of hidden services that users can interact with exactly as they interact with their existing, non-resistant tools. This is decent advice, but just serves to make my point all the more; Censorship resistance is becoming a problem in Turkey, people start using Tor. If the aforementioned peer to peer based social media platform actually existed, they would start using whatever service best evaded the censorship they're railing against now via Tor. Since we have Tor already, why bother with such a platform? Because despite Tor, the platform itself could be hijacked and Tor would not assist in censorship resistance in this scenario. Twitter might be happy to tell Turkey to get lost when they start making demands, but what if you're trying to evade censorship from the US government or entity with similar level of power? This will likely become an issue in future, having platforms that are immune to hijacking is a good way to address it.
peterkelly 13y ago
What I had in mind was something that would operate in a peer-to-peer fashion similar to bittorrent, and everyone who uses it would install an app to use it. If people only or mainly used web-based frontends it would be unlikely to work well. Also in response to the earlier comment: the app could provide a friendly interface for generating keys which doesn't require the user to know the technical details. They would just have an "identity file" that would be stored on the app, with options to copy it to a usb stick etc. Additional paragraph which seems to be cut off from all comments.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  > everyone who uses it would install an app to use it Exactly. Meaning you must have key management. > Also in response to the earlier comment: the app could provide a friendly interface for generating keys which doesn't require the user to know the technical details. They would just have an "identity file" that would be stored on the app, with options to copy it to a usb stick etc. You are repeating history. PGP and many similar products have provided exactly this for end-user encryption of email for more than two decades. Not one has gained mass adoption. You cannot make a system that relies on the user to understand anything at all about key management, no matter how friendly the interface. "I will write a new program that makes email encryption easy!" has long been a joke/cliche. Key management is a problem that must be addressed with something more substantive than just yet another new interface tacked on top of the same old ideas. I can't even get intelligent developers to manage SSH keys properly. They lose them constantly, or forget their passphrases (if I can even get them to use a passphrase). There is absolutely no hope of making a service anywhere near as popular as Twitter that adds the friction of key management.