5 years is way too short.

I’m surprised the author did not mention NNTP, the protocol that ran the larges federated discussion system since 1986.

ActivityPub reinvented NNTP with less efficiency and very poor documentation.

The price is a bit shocking.

makes me lose faith in Debian as an organisation

AFAIK this person has been also banned by FOSDEM and FSFE and others so I would take his statement with a pinch of salt before blaming Debian:

https://lwn.net/Articles/888204/ https://fsfe.org/about/legal/minutes/minutes-2019-10-12.en.pdf https://openlabs.cc/en/statement-we-have-been-a-target-of-disinformation-efforts-our-initial-reaction/

You just described what Briar is designed to do: multi-hop over WiFi and Bluetooth.

https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/

Not if you use a distribution like Debian Stable.

“Free” as in “unpaid labor” or “free to proprietize my work”

If anything, there’s nothing more democratic that allowing for infinitely different “views” on the contents. Besides, there is nothing lazy in such implementation, on the contrary.

That would only generate echo chambers. Instead, each user should see a personalized ranking of contents based on what they want and who they trust (and who their “friends” trust and so on).

https://briarproject.org/ should be the most voted option. It works without Internet connection and even peer-to-peer over bluetooth.

In theory dedicated hardware is almost always better, especially if the SBC is running is a dedicated network segment properly isolated from other hosts.

In practice it really depends on the threat model aka the kind of attacks your are facing.

No. Data sent between nodes e.g. messages, images and status is not a leak. It is what the applications are supposed to handle. Third parties do not receive data or metadata.

If you have any reliable source to back your claims please share it.

Anonimity is simply privacy regarding your identity.

I can’t imagine you can get a lot of power with that design

It’s the opposite. All recumbent bikes allow for higher power output.

By using onion routing to connect to it, as Briar does. Also by not having a server at all, again as Briar does.

It leaks plenty of metadata. Also it’s hardly easy to self-host.

Briar is a good example.

First of all, Tox does not protect metadata at all. Secondly, it comes out of 4chan and its approach to security is pretty questionable.

email is an extremely important technology to start supporting for privacy and freedom

No: email, even when encrypted, leaks plenty of metadata. From a privacy perspective it has been a lost cause for decades. We need new protocols.

Unless you are on a highway a velomobile is not slower than a car. Especially in cities where bikes can overtake cars at traffic lights and take shortcuts that are closed to cars.