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...
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.