Huh? The AOL you're thinking of included an enormous cross-section of the population, with no controls on who could talk to who. If the Internet is unsafe, then so is AOL, because they're the same thing.

The irony in this case is that the speech that is attempted to be censored isn't even illegal. (at least in the U.S., where our liberal, cherished "anything goes" approach is enshrined in the Constitution.)

This simply argues that they’re special-casing against non-established systems — if you applied it uniformly, you’d trivially lose things you obviously want to keep.

That is, this is a stupid operation that is at best sponsored by “think of the children!” Mothers Against Everything foundation.

To go from that narrow assertion to "ban email apps and probably the Internet itself" is fallacious reasoning at its finest.

There's no rebuttal by refuting any of the premises or finding logical flaws, just straight to the end of the world as we know it.

You didn’t argue this, and I’m not clear that matrix or similar technology makes any direct, intended or significant effort to do so beyond the much broader, all-encompassing goal of “let nothing be unavailable”. But if true, I might be more inclined to agree with you.

What you did argue is that

    a key use case for federated messaging platforms is to evade censorship

But we also know that illegal activity is a key use case of the internet, of email, of encryption and a wide variety of other decentralized and federated technologies. This is hardly a good justification because you’ll ban all sorts of good things.

The only thing that protects your argument against everything else is that you arbitrarily limit it to non-established technologies — in the name of all that is good and wholesome, you would kill anything like the internet, email, etc, that is not itself the existing technologies.

A web browser is only more legitimate because the internet is more broadly used. Which isn’t much of a case for legitimacy.

The above are use daily for extremist content, CP, circumventing numerous national laws in numerous places...

Hard to draw the line.

If you run a monolithic, centralized service specifically designed to avoid censorship, and you don't moderate what users do on your service, and some of those users hurt people with your service, then you should expect your service will be shut down as Parler was.

And if you do the same thing, but separate the front end from the back end, and have different entities run them to provide legal separation, while practically and functionally the result is identical to that of the monolithic centralized service and your system is used to hurt people, then you should also expect that whatever components can be deplatformed will be deplatformed.

Emails are always coming up in court cases etc. as people regularly use them to organise or discuss criminal acts, and it is sometimes used with E2E encryption so nobody can intercept and police the contents. I'm not convinced you've drawn a clear line. When is a protocol client responsible for the content shared or accessed with it, and when is a client not responsible for it.

It's amazing to see how far we've fallen - to be at ease with the idea that there can be no such thing as a private conversation, and therefore that any private conversation is by definition illegal.

Any crime should require an actual victim. Which means there is evidence of it happening. You don't need a permanent record of everyone's conversations to uncover such crimes, police just need to do the job which we pay them for, which is to investigate.

CP and terrorism are both disgusting, horrible things, but even those are not worth losing all our basic human freedoms over, or we won't be left with a lifestyle worth defending.

For some people (although maybe comparatively few) it's primarily about building a more robust Internet that works also if centralized service(s) disappear

Why would we accept this? We don't even accept the situation in which Google is _able_ to censor anything for the general public.