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Charles Stanhope

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Christopher Webber's thoughts about approaches to distributed anti-abuse got me thinking about other forms of abuse. What will the general approach be to protecting individuals and the nodes they are on from legal bullying, either from the government or from people with  too much money and lawyers? Right now the general approach is for people to hide behind large enough networks that can push back against unwarranted legal aggression if that network thinks it is in its best interest. That's not much protection, but it is more than what an individual would get on their own. Also the large network is unlikely to be harmed regardless of what happens, so the rest of the network is "safe" and continues on.

It occurs to me that small federated nodes may be more vulnerable to legal threats and would be less able to provide protection to its members. Will people who are likely to be targets (activists or anybody outspoken) have to run their own nodes? Will an organization be formed that federated nodes can join to obtain legal counsel?

An example of the kind of legal bullying I am thinking about: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/twitter-sues-homeland-security-fake-alt-uscis-236965

Sarah Elkins, Mike Linksvayer, Christopher Allan Webber likes this.

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Probably the answer is that the "federated web" needs to move more peer to peer so it's harder to squash individuals like this, or pressure a "node" to do so.

There are some decisions in ActivityPub and the linked data approaches which mean that they will survive mostly intact in a move to a peer to peer encrypted system. The main thing you'd want to do is remove HTTP as a transport protocol in favor of something more decentralized. The "being attached to a node" aspect of federated networks will need to be phased out.

Luckily, we can still use the concepts of inbox/outbox and our vocabularies and etc and things should still be roughly compatible. The only thing in ActivityPub that I think is very strictly HTTP is GET/POST, but I think that can be layered over a more peer to peer system anyway.

Christopher Allan Webber at 2017-04-07T14:01:19Z

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In the meanwhile, it's still useful to work on the HTTP as a transport approach, because that's where people are. But I hope we can migrate.

Of course, the "migration success" of IPv6 doesn't give much hope for the capacity for large systems to migrate... :)

Christopher Allan Webber at 2017-04-07T14:02:10Z

Btw, I think one point in your above post is very important:

Will an organization be formed that federated nodes can join to obtain legal counsel?

They should exist, and they already might... EFF, ACLU might already be willing to take on such work, and thus should be supported. And if not, hopefully another org will, and we should support that.

Christopher Allan Webber at 2017-04-07T16:48:29Z