What about LokiNet ?

Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers.

It sucks that literally using something that should be the default, truly protecting privacy, has such a bad reputation because… well it protects privacy.

Lemmy.zip has already blocked UK users and Lemmy.world will almost certainly do the same.

For clarity, lemmy.zip had blocked them months ago because the owner of lemmy.zip is based in the UK and theoretically could actually be fined. This is not the same situation as lemmy.world.

The UK moves are very worrying. We're trying to help people to move away from big tech at our site https://www.rebeltechalliance.org/

We recommend fediverse protocols wherever possible - so I'm interested in the comments here about how that is affected

Trouble is, there is little that can be done.

Enough folks drank the coolaid, and now we're stuck with surveillance laws masquerading as child protection laws.

Those laws can, and will, get worse over time. However, new mediums will arise, or old ones will rise to the occasion (IRC goes brr). The main thing to do is remain calm, make it a key voter issue, and watch the bastards fold right before the next election.

Wi-Fi mesh might be possible with neighbors, but mitm is extremely likely. Also, a non-Internet-routing protocol will need to be invented as I do not want possibly liable traffic to run over the clear web without some kind of tunnel.

Outlawing VPNs? Good luck doing business with the rest of the world

We need to start our own Internet with black Jack and hookers.

Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers. I2P is scattered in implementation and cannot handle high load.

Physical bluetooth mesh networks or other technology is an example. Maybe even a new version of dial-up.

These are incompatible statements lol

Tor is fine, I'm looking at this on Tor Browser right now. I would say the jank level is about 20%. Quokk.au, actually, for some weird reason has significant problems with it (significant slowness and sometimes refuses to load a page). I actually have no idea what's going on with that, but it and I think one other site are the only Fedi sites that have any kind of problem at all. The majority (but not all) news sites and things work fine. Some things do not and I have to bounce over to some normal browser. The jank level is definitely not 0, but it's bearable.

I actually do agree about needing to set up a better architecture overall. Tor is an extremely special-purpose architecture for one thing only (near-bulletproof privacy and firewall traversal even against extremely aggressive government attempts to defeat both), which is honestly a pretty fantastic start, but there's a lot more that goes into "the internet" than just slapping a slightly janky but super-safe VPN over the front of it.

The main point is: Hey! Don't badmouth Tor, it's good (and the jank level of starting from scratch instead will be super high for any forseeable future.)

meshtastic

Meshtastic is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source!

Only tangentially related, but in the vein of privacy and circumventing surveillance, one communication idea I really like in that vein is from the show The Leftovers--the way the "Remnant" group communicates only by simple handwritten notes.

I just like the idea that something so rudimentary could theoretically overcome a lot of very high-tech snooping equipment. Good luck using your Stingray cell tower simulator to intercept my notepad scribbles.

Two days from now there's a seminar happening in the capital city of my country on a technology called mesh/meshtastic(?). They claim to have found a way to send messages in blackout conditions.

I'ts difficult to find resources but here's a blogpost about it: https://blog.liamcottle.com/2024/05/01/getting-started-with-meshtastic

Not saying this is our solution, but I think these sorts of ideas and re-imaginings are what we ought to be in the pursuit of right now.

I live in the UK and host my own instance (not hosted in the UK). I don't really have any real active users other than myself and most signups end up being deleted as soon as they post some advertising spam.

So, to that end I ensured I don't have any communities marked as NSFW on my instance at all. But, I'm one person and cannot moderate the entire fediverse content I carry. When it moves to enforcement time and I see a definite sign of targeting fediverse hosts, or (as I expect will be a first phase) warnings being issued to fediverse hosts. I'll likely just close registration, go on an account purge and lock out content to logged in users only. Then scale down the operation to a server hosted in my own house and just for me.

If things start to turn into serious enforcement against fediverse hosts, I fully expect the number of instances that will allow UK users to drastically reduce. But, don't forget this is coming to the EU and US if things keep moving as they are. So, there may be no real way to survive as an independent forum/gathering place. And maybe, maybe that's been part of the plan all along? Hobbyists like me cannot provide the time or financial burden to perform age checks or moderate everything to ensure there's nothing that will breach the extremely (and deliberately) vague rules.

We live in interesting times.

with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet

I don't think this is true. It's a bit complicated because there are ways to obfuscate the traffic, but generally speaking, I'd assume governments could track and block nodes just as easily as you can find them.

Tor is slow

It might trip you up for real-time things like gaming and you might take a while to download HUGE files, but it's much faster than its historical reputation

and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers

This is true for any privacy software. Encrypted chats, cryptographic currency, darknets. Even the internet itself has that reputation. Anyone trying to hide what they're doing is likely to seek privacy tools. Reputation means nothing.

Tor is not that slow for normal internet usage. You can even watch videos in SD.

I have always wondered about distributed hosting, like BitTorrent, but for websites. You go to a webpage, and it gets seeded from however many people host the file. It should be harder to take down. I do not code at all. Is that a thing? Why not?

Besides being slow I think the issues with darkweb can be overcome simply through general interest growing. Currently I personally have no real motivation to use such technologies beyond the decentralized fediverse on clearnet. But if things keep going the way they are, then I'll have motivation. I'm into digital media archiving so if that gets pushed further underground then I will have reason to bother.

I am paying attention of course, Canada is likely to copy cat EU/UK/AUS. Just as a general rule of thumb, but this stuff is in the works here too specifically.

Another thing to consider: https://handshake.org/

"Decentralized naming and certificate authority. An experimental peer-to-peer root naming system."

Something like Tor only solves half the problem. A Tor hidden service still has physical reality and a person who is hosting it, and who can be held responsible for failing to register the thing with the feds or file a moderation transparency report or whatever the latest nonsense is. The anonymity network helps to hide where the equipment and who the operator is, but there's still a single point of failure and a person to blame for the community.

We need a way to run online communities that are not online services: no single point of failure, no individual or partnership describable as a service's operator, and no meaningful way in which one person provides access to the system to another person.

This tech we all use is advancing exponentially.

And we must be ready to embrace the dizzying changes in the next few years so that we can improve our lives and have better governments.

I just jack off into the camera every once Ina a while in case any government agent is watching. I don't have to do it. But they have to watch it

Frankly, the answer should be for every site to just cut the UK off entirely. Let them have their own little North Korean style micronet. Maybe when the people of the UK can't visit anything but a bunch of miserable English websites, they will get off their asses and elect competent leaders. If not, well maybe they're just not the sort of people we should allow access to the global communications network. Let the barbarians stew in their own barbarism.

If doing an overlay network (network on top of the Internet), you probably won't be able to do much better than Tor or i2p.

We confirm the trilemma that an AC [anonymous communication] protocol can only achieve two out of the following three properties: strong anonymity (i.e., anonymity up to a negligible chance), low bandwidth overhead, and low latency overhead.

https://freedom.cs.purdue.edu/projects/trilemma.html

This applies to all types of anonymous networks as well (BT, Wifi, etc).

In the future new technologies will maybe bypass internet but right now the best thing to do it's to start being less internet dependent: archive stuff for your home server, buy physical media, preserve what you'd need and like.

You are not overreacting, an alternative to internet is needed and it's not that hard to create, there are many projects already of networks working over radio and wifi, we should probably just stick to one of these and work to expand it