Matrix has shown how incredibly difficult it is to make a modern service in a decentralised way. Requirements like preventing spam become immensely difficult.
Do any fully trustable ID validation services exist? Ones that verifiably never store your ID but just a validity status for a given ID on a blockchain?
Assuming you don't want actual ID verification, the choices are even larger but with different trade-offs.
Imagine a messaging app for example, a 1 month old account with a Nigerian phone number cold DMs an account in Australia. The likelihood of this being spam/abuse is extremely high. Vs a 5 year old account that mostly messages mutual contacts cold DMing an account in their own country.
In many countries, phone numbers are a proxy for ID and are difficult to get without having a local ID. The countries which have not secured their phone number system will be less trusted by spam filters.
Oh, TLS also. Encrypted connections over HTTP are trivial.
Arguably this has created far more freedom by making encrypted network traffic default and free. Convenience is also freedom when it comes to accessibility.
It's pretty good today! Lots of things improved a lot! Some big clean ups!
But think of how much better it would be if people stayed woke, if they didn't just throw up their hands call defeat & say it was never going to work. If there wasn't such a bleak rot in our soul, if we could try to play slightly longer games, I think in the medium & long run it would be much much better for us all.
It feels so easy to spread sedition, to project these fatalisms that only big dumb lumbering central systems win. I'm so tired of this bleakness, this snap to convenience as the only perceived possible win. Let the prophecy self fulfill no more, let us arise from this torpor. A little Ubuntu would be ao good for us all. Ubuntu the old saying (that the distro was inspired by) goes: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together"