Conversation

Notices

1. Bob Mottram (bob@social.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 21-Dec-2017 04:48:48 EST Bob Mottram
   @masoud There are a few things.
   
   

   Obtaining a clearnet domain is hard

   It isn't if you know the process, but for the average person obtaining a domain name is something outside of their knowledge and therefore possibly scary. It also doesn't help that there are intimidating technical acronyms involved.
   
   

   Creating a dynamicdns account is similarly intimidating

   I'm trying to imagine what coming to this from a totally non-technical perspective world feel like, and I expect it would be baffling. What even is DNS? Why does it need to be dynamic?
   
   

   Forwarding ports from an internet router is not a standardized process

   Each router type has its own unique interface, so you can't give out standard instructions which will always work.
   
   

   People have been conditioned against TOR

   A possible solution to all of the above is just to use onion addresses in a Tor compatible browser. There has however been a long FUD campaign against Tor in the mainstream media such that even if the average person has heard of it (I think this is mostly true) then they have been told that it's some SCARY SCARY THING only used by criminals, terrorists or child abusers. And maybe now also Putin has been appended to the list. There may be alternatives which have not yet been demonized, such as using IPFS addresses.
   1. arunisaac (arunisaac@social.systemreboot.net)'s status on Thursday, 21-Dec-2017 15:54:51 EST arunisaac

      in reply to
      We should start building desktop/mobile apps that internally communicate over Tor. Tor would let us effortlessly punch holes through any NAT/Firewall, and bring us back to "the good old Internet" where any IP could talk to any other IP. The users of these apps need not even know that the communication is happening over Tor. That way, any anti-Tor FUD campaigns they have been exposed to would be irrelevant.
      
      With this model, we could potentially make it very easy to create run single user GNU Social instances, etc. effectively making it some kind of a P2P network. Of course, there are many technical details to be worked out for this to happen, but it is well within our abilities to achieve this.
      
      Ricochet and OnionShare are two apps that already do this kind of thing.
      1. Bob Mottram (bob@social.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 21-Dec-2017 16:54:09 EST Bob Mottram

         in reply to
         @arunisaac Yes. Not needing to care about NAT is the big advantage of using onion addresses.
         
         It is possible to run gnusocial/postactiv/pleroma/etc from an onion address, but as it stands at the moment such instances won't be able to federate properly with clearnet instances.