Today the U.S. House of Representatives passed the TAKE IT DOWN Act, giving the powerful a dangerous new route to manipulate platforms into removing lawful speech that they simply don't like. President Trump himself has said that he would use the law to censor his critics. The bill passed the...
The fediverse can form the basis of the new Internet. More use of “local only” comms will help an “underground” start to develop.
I think it would be interesting for Lemmy to add an in-between “neighborhood” level for comms where certain instances like 'grad could interact but larger instances could not. I have always thought it would be healthy for Hexbear to split to a new instance on occasion and federate back when there’s a struggle session, but it’s also understandable why that hasn’t happened yet.
I haven’t read the text of the bill, but the Fediverse, in and of itself, is not a solution. The Fediverse is much more resilient against corporate censorship for a number of reasons, but the infrastructure is still largely centralized under the roofs of a handful of cloud hosting providers. When the Five Eyes deem an instance (or the whole platform) to be a threat to their political power, rather than a threat to Reddit’s ad revenue, they will lean on these cloud service providers to conduct surveillance on users or shut down instances, and they will comply without putting up a fight out of self-preservation.
If one is careful to avoid using companies for email, payment processing, hosting, etc. who have any sort of business tie to America.