To be clear, I understand the desire for truly anonymous services. But after two decades of experimenting and thinking of this problem. I don't think it is possible for an truly anonymous solution that is also ergonomic to use.
Things like briar exist, and for you use cases, existing tools might be enough. Briar is fantastic for communicating with people you know and willing to jump through some hoops be part of a community that is anonymous, secure, and provides lots of ways of making introductions and posts.
But there are reasons why Meta, Twitter, Linkedin and the like are well above any anonymous solution in terms of users.
- Identity (including pseudo identity of anonymous users) is established.
- Spam. There is ungodly amount of spammers out there, as email has shown. If you have played with nostr or scuttlebutt you would also see just how horrible the spam is.
- Account recovery, people are bad with passwords and storing secrets. Very bad. And even the most secure people can get exploited.
- Hosting your data is problematic. Who hosts data which may be illegal? When illegal data is flagged, how does it get purged? Merely being the transit for data is protected in the US, but physically hosting that data is not.
- The vast majority of people are unable to run a persistent service for their identity and content. Even if they are willing, they lack the means. You end up targeting a very small subset of people who are willing, able, and capable of running a service. And that service requires care and feeding. You might end up with millions of vulnerable instances.
- Scalability. No one has come remotely close to solving how one of these solutions would scale to billions of users. Or even tens of millions. DHTs become painfully slow and bloated. Even if a solution did start catching on, it would quickly then fail because the user experience would crater as it gains popularity.
I have become convinced that making an ergonomic briar is impossible without making some concessions.
Complaining that a new and unproven tool's chosen concessions are bad inhibits experimentation.
Things like briar exist, and for you use cases, existing tools might be enough. Briar is fantastic for communicating with people you know and willing to jump through some hoops be part of a community that is anonymous, secure, and provides lots of ways of making introductions and posts.
But there are reasons why Meta, Twitter, Linkedin and the like are well above any anonymous solution in terms of users.
- Identity (including pseudo identity of anonymous users) is established.
- Spam. There is ungodly amount of spammers out there, as email has shown. If you have played with nostr or scuttlebutt you would also see just how horrible the spam is.
- Account recovery, people are bad with passwords and storing secrets. Very bad. And even the most secure people can get exploited.
- Hosting your data is problematic. Who hosts data which may be illegal? When illegal data is flagged, how does it get purged? Merely being the transit for data is protected in the US, but physically hosting that data is not.
- The vast majority of people are unable to run a persistent service for their identity and content. Even if they are willing, they lack the means. You end up targeting a very small subset of people who are willing, able, and capable of running a service. And that service requires care and feeding. You might end up with millions of vulnerable instances.
- Scalability. No one has come remotely close to solving how one of these solutions would scale to billions of users. Or even tens of millions. DHTs become painfully slow and bloated. Even if a solution did start catching on, it would quickly then fail because the user experience would crater as it gains popularity.
I have become convinced that making an ergonomic briar is impossible without making some concessions.
Complaining that a new and unproven tool's chosen concessions are bad inhibits experimentation.