makeasnek
Pretty well established case law at this point. If it weren't, you'd see Tor relay operators, small ISPs, etc being hauled into court constantly.
There are no protections for me if I unknowingly let some stranger use me as a host or router for CP or some pedo shit. It’s not a risk I’m willing to take. There need to be legal protections in place, like there are for ISPs.
There are, at least in the US. That's why running a Tor node is legal and so is a coffee-shop sharing their wifi to customers. They are not legally liable for actions of users, they are just routers.
Each network has its own way of addressing this with pros and cons. Personally, idc, I don't mind being a "router" in exchange for other computers "routing" to me. I don't mind the idea of sharing my internet connection via wifi with my neighborhood, it should be a resource for all.
The cost of having open communication networks or free speech or privacy or any liberties is that people may use those liberties to do bad things, but I'd rather live in a world where we have liberties that sometimes get abused than in a world without liberties where those who control things get basically unlimited abuse of the same liberties we are not afforded.
If you want an easy onboarding solution for nostr check out https://damus.io/
The cool thing is if you don't like the first app you try, there's dozens of others, and your data moves across all of them seamlessly. I started on iris and now I'm on nostrudel and I'll probably try out a few more over the next year before I really settle in to the best one for me.
If you have questions, check out !nostr@lemmy.world or use the #asknostr tag once you have your account setup, people are very helpful there!
A P2P application for anonymous communication. There's chat rooms, forums, the whole range of things, all peer-to-peer, all decentralized, all built with privacy and anonymity as a feature.
Relying on legislation to get passed or not get passed only gets us so far. Yes, absolutely, write your reps and vote, but also donate to your favorite decentralized, private tech project so they can improve the user experience and get more users. We need to make tyrannical censorship & surveillance not only technically impossible but politically unfeasible. The way we do that is by building better tech and getting more and more of the population to use it.
Sounds like GDPR is the problem then, not federated services.
You don't have to convert it to fiat if you don't want to, plenty of people use Bitcoin as currency, that is the entire point. Users tipped each other nearly a million USD worth of it on nostr int he last two months ($950k). You can go to any major city and find place to buy/sell/spend it. Many places online accept it too, of course. The network effect is quite large. Bitcoin's market cap is larger than sweden's GDP. It moves trillions of dollars of value every year. Not people "hodling", people using it to do funds transfer.
But if you want to, you can absolutely convert it, with a single click. Those middlemen typically take a lower cut since they're doing conversion not sending/receiving/settlement which is a much risker and therefore expensive service. There is, for example, no counterparty risk if you convert somebody's BTC to their native currency, but there is if you transfer that person's money to another person or act as an intermediary. I use strike for this, strike's conversion fee is less than 1%, in many apps or exchanges, conversion is literally free because the app wants to incentivize you to store money with them and because it's just updating some row in a database.
And what are the fees like on those services? Does their fee structure work for micropayments? And do they support every country out-of-the box or are there some they don't support? How do they handle chargebacks and counter-party risk? What is their settlement time? Do they occasionally freeze accounts for seemingly nonsensical or political reasons? Since we're on the privacy community, how is their privacy? Can you, for example, sign up as an instance admin and automatically have them forward payments to content creators, or would you need to custom-code that through an API and then register with a non-standard account because now you aren't a regular user but an intermediary? Try being an "intermediary" on Paypal and your account will get shut down very quickly, because you aren't allowed to do that. You'd have to custom negotiate a special deal with them and fill out a bunch more paperwork and probably pay higher fees and meet a bunch of other requirements like being incorporated and obtaining insurance and auditors and the list goes on and on.
Ask anybody in the adult industry how much trouble they have getting access to these services even though the business they are engaging in is perfectly legal. Not grey area legal, fully certified legal by the US Supreme Court and appellate courts up and down the system for decades.
Answer these questions and you start to see the appeal of not having a third-party custodian do all this. Bitcoin lightning can do all of this, instantly, for 10-1000x less fees and massively less complication. You can say you don't like crypto, that's fine, but it's legitimately better at solving these kinds of problems which is why adoption has been growing for 15 straight years.
You may want to look into Qubes, it can natively route an entire OS through Tor. Note that routing all your traffic may hurt your anonymity. For example, there what if an app on your machine reaches out to somewhere and reports the serial number of a piece of hardware and it does it through your "anonymous" Tor connection? Virtualizing that hardware can help avoid that. Think through your threat model.
Don't do that then. Also consider that people buy and re-sell used phones. The same IMEI is not a guarantee it's the same user. Privacy isn't necessarily about being absolute, sometimes it comes in shades.