Re:We need a censorship-resistant truth protocol – I have th...
by Bender on Saturday June 28, 2025 @02:01PM
(#44406767)
Let’s make it uncensorable now, before it’s too late.
The tech has existed since the start of the internet but people just don't want to bother with it. If the majority of people self hosted their own content then had something similar to the old "web rings" of sorts then it would become exponentially harder to play whack-a-mole in taking down, censoring, redacting, cancelling, etc... I know all the arguments. Wont scale!! well that is a lie. I ran a porn site in 2000 that scaled to tens of thousands of concurrent users on a single Pentium 3 700 Mhz server. But it needs to handle millions!! also a lie when everyone is running their own nodes. In reality a single video might have a few thousand simultaneous viewers and that can be handled easily by 1999 tech and trivially today on modern tech. People have been programmed to believe the only possible options are the large centralized platforms and it's just lies. No crypto needed, just a simple server, a web daemon and a platform managed by the open source community with its repository not hosted on a platform owned by a corporation. Ignore everyone. Happy to myth-bust all the other lies. Pick your favorite forum software and try it out. If people complain about friction just accept those are the people you probably don't want anyway. Their contributions will be extremely low effort. Find some quality members and do not expect it to explode in growth over night.
Hacker News is running on a single server. It sails along just fine with the occasional code bug that team dang have always managed to sort out. Most of the time it is not on a CDN. It can even handle some topics that some governments would really like not discussed. To make it harder to cancel would just mean multiple people at YC creating multiple registrar accounts, a few domains each and the low risk members each knowing about some of the fall-back domains and of course a few .onion domains each.
If the site is not hosting borderline content then one could even just run HAProxy and Wireguard on a little VM and host the actual server at home. This works fine even with CG-NAT as the home is reaching out to the VM over WireGuard. Cachable content can remain at the edge with the right cache-control headers and HAProxy configuration.
To put another way, if 8chan can still exist then pretty much anything within the gray areas of law can. not linking to there from here
The tech has existed since the start of the internet but people just don't want to bother with it. If the majority of people self hosted their own content then had something similar to the old "web rings" of sorts then it would become exponentially harder to play whack-a-mole in taking down, censoring, redacting, cancelling, etc... I know all the arguments. Wont scale!! well that is a lie. I ran a porn site in 2000 that scaled to tens of thousands of concurrent users on a single Pentium 3 700 Mhz server. But it needs to handle millions!! also a lie when everyone is running their own nodes. In reality a single video might have a few thousand simultaneous viewers and that can be handled easily by 1999 tech and trivially today on modern tech. People have been programmed to believe the only possible options are the large centralized platforms and it's just lies. No crypto needed, just a simple server, a web daemon and a platform managed by the open source community with its repository not hosted on a platform owned by a corporation. Ignore everyone. Happy to myth-bust all the other lies. Pick your favorite forum software and try it out. If people complain about friction just accept those are the people you probably don't want anyway. Their contributions will be extremely low effort. Find some quality members and do not expect it to explode in growth over night.
Hacker News is running on a single server. It sails along just fine with the occasional code bug that team dang have always managed to sort out. Most of the time it is not on a CDN. It can even handle some topics that some governments would really like not discussed. To make it harder to cancel would just mean multiple people at YC creating multiple registrar accounts, a few domains each and the low risk members each knowing about some of the fall-back domains and of course a few .onion domains each.
If the site is not hosting borderline content then one could even just run HAProxy and Wireguard on a little VM and host the actual server at home. This works fine even with CG-NAT as the home is reaching out to the VM over WireGuard. Cachable content can remain at the edge with the right cache-control headers and HAProxy configuration.
To put another way, if 8chan can still exist then pretty much anything within the gray areas of law can. not linking to there from here