cyclohexane

I'm looking into hosting one of these for the first time. From my limited research, XMPP seems to win in every way, which makes me think I must be missing something. Matrix is almost always mentioned as the de-facto standard, but I rarely saw arguments why it is better than XMPP?

Xmpp seems way easier to host, requiring less resources, has many more options for clients, and is simpler and thus easier to manage and reason about when something goes wrong.

So what's the deal?

Given the extistence of technologies like Monero and SimpleX chat, I wonder if it is possible for a truly anonymous content sharing platform to exist? And does it?

Use cases:

• sharing pirated content without a link back to you
• journalists or political activists not wanting to be found or caught by a government

The platform should not allow the following to know the details of what you do on this platform:

• users on the platform: should not know the identity of a poster unless they disclose it
• the host of the platform: should not know which content belongs to who, or be able to deduce it via traffic logs
• Intermediates like the ISP, DNS, or your router should not be able to link any content to you. However it is okay if they know that you use the platform at all, just not what you do with it.

Does something like this exist?

Image Alt Text: "After downloading a 2.5GB movie

Me: Presses play Movie unsupported file" A person is shown with eyes on her laptop punching the wall beside her, causing it to crack.

I am wanting to self host a fediverse instance. I don't hope to make it big. Hoping for 200 users at most, and I won't advertise it heavily so it'll probably be a while before it gets there.

Is it a bad idea to host something like this on local hardware at home? I have a lot of local-only self hosted services, and I wouldn't want those to be compromised.

But my biggest fear is overloading my network. I already don't get the fastest signal in some parts of my house, and I am worried the extra traffic might put more pressure on the network.

What are your thoughts on hosting local? Should I just avoid the headache and host on public instance?

Something small and 2 or 4 GB RAM. Raspberry pi's compute power is good enough for me, I'm not doing anything too intensive.

Is raspberry pi 4 still the best answer?

I am a tinkerer and don't mind tinkering. I typically use Gentoo Linux as main OS. I also don't mind ARM or other architectures. I've been eyeing the RockPro64 as well.

Alt text: they hate to see me win. Good thing I don't.

Is it a bad idea to use my desktop to self host?

What are the disadvantages?? Can they be overcome?

I use it primarily for programming, sometimes gaming and browsing.

There is this common narrative I see all the time, implying that we as individuals are empowered to choose and manifest our own destiny, and this comes up often in privacy discussions.

Don't like Facebook's privacy nightmares? Just don't use Facebook!

Don't like personalized ads? I remember a popular post on reddit saying "if your ad interrupts my YouTube video, I will hate your product".

Don't like Google chrome hegemony? Just use Firefox!

And while I agree that we should strive to do that, the battle doesn't end here. Facebook has shadow accounts for people who never signed up. Google chrome keeps it's hegemony despite people on the Internet advocating Firefox day and night. And ads continue to be extremely profitable despite you "hating the product" because it interrupted your YouTube video.

Even worse: even if you "hate the product", you now already know it. You now know they product exists, and possibly whatever they wanted you to know about it. The reality is that these companies own your eyes. They control what shows up on your screen. And even if you hate it, they control what you end up learning.

the reality is that our individual resistance is very far from enough

I am not saying it is completely futile. It is a step in the right direction. But the only effective solution is organized action. We, alone, cannot achieve much. Unless we organize our resistance against privacy violations, we will continue to live through this privacy nightmare.