Hate to be that guy, but there won’t be an internet split because you won’t be able to use the darknet anymore. Number 4 would also mean using only official OSes, no Linux allowed. This can be forced by only allowing the trade of PCs and mainboards with secure boot enabled and without a way to disable it or getting into user mode.

On any official OS you won’t be able to install anything from unofficial avenues. You won’t be the admin anymore, only a user. The Tor browser won’t be available in any official store. And even if you could get the installer, the OS will forbid you from installing and using unsigned or “unknown” applications.

You probably could use your current PC for a while without these restrictions, but once it breaks or you need to upgrade its over. I hope we won’t get even close to this, but it looks like we are on the way. Both, in the EU and the US. Moved along by both, left and right. The only thing we can do is look and see who positions themselves where and vote accordingly.

Umm… apart from my ARR setup and few specific apps and websites. I use Tor and I2P for almost everything.

And for doomsday scenario I’ve several physical books I love and won’t mind re-reading until the heat death. Also I’ve downloaded several GBs of EPUBs I still have to get to… I think I’ll be alright.

I will play dwarf fortress until the power turns off. Then I’ll read books. Nothing will stop me from ignoring this fucked up world i cant leave.

With all of this prepared, still, IT IS NOT A REPLACEMENT FOR POLITICAL ACTION

It will get worse. Harder. More inaccessible. More and more people won’t be able to live in a free net, and with that, the prospects of fruitful coordination will wane as well.

And this is by design. If they make it inescapable, people rise up. If they slowly make it less and less accessible, people end up in disarray.

Going the Tor way is not a saving grace. It’s a band aid.

Sincerely, A person living in Russia, one who has already witnessed it unfold.

I can’t get over how fucking stupid normies are to cause this in their wake everywhere they go. The web was fine when it only had nerds on it

Buddy, I’m ready for the day the internet finally turns Chinese.

Let’s start hosting the Fediverse and Threadiverse on the Tor network.

They’ll require isps to block anything they can’t decode and force MITM SSL keys

The tools are already there, the change is just cost optimization. Your age, post code and your buying and traveling habits identify you anyways. I remember from “Little Brother” how they identified people with the way they were walking. Protagonist was putting some pieces of paper into his shoes.

I already download all my media so I have offline access.

I’m honestly sick of social media. I mainly just view it as a news source, only commenting on Reddit Lemmy threads because its convenient to do so.

How is #4 going to work if I use Linux on my primary devices?

Reticulum

Wut. My home network requires all traffic to go out through a VPN, and I run Tor ontop of that for most everything else.

Who raw dogs on the internet??

It’s my understanding that Tor is primarily a way to access the clearnet while darkweb access was added as an afterthought. I don’t see Tor solving the problem of I.D. verification on social media, for example.

I2p was designed as a completely separate network. Haven’t used it myself but this seems the way to go for most day to day activity.

Unable to watch porn.

Torrent the porn. I’ve seen plenty on offer at TPB.

Required to give your real name and ID in order to use social media.

Arrested for “mean tweets”, “anti-government views”, “liking subversive memes”, etc

Have your own domain from https://njal.la/ bought with Monero and create a single user instance for Lemmy or Mastodon should allow you to remain anonymous and avoid being arrested.

Only be allowed to use approved applications from Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc

Will Tor and I2P be approved by Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc? There will always be FOSS and there will always be a way to install alternative OSs on computers.

Set your downlink speed to 10-15mbps to acclimatize yourself

I’ve heard I2P is fairly quick, torrenting is encouraged.

Use bookmarks or password manager notes to have the URLs of your commonly used programs, services, and repos (#Monero, #XMRBazaar, #Pitch, #Dread, etc.)

Been doing so for years. You might have a hard time finding someone in the privacy community that doesn’t do this.

Get used to text messages instead of audio or video calls. (Audio and video use UDP and generally give your real IP to either a central STUN server or the other peer. (it may be possible to force audio and video calls over TCP exclusively, but the latency would be high and therefore make the call unenjoyable.)

Messaging via Signal is my go to. Rarely do I even have my voip app active.

Checkout SplinterCon if you think about this seriously.

I urge users to become participants and contributors. As Kongar has written, we have access to sophisticated hardware, but we’re not deploying it. If mobile-computer operators contributed to a mesh-network we’d be in a position to discard subscriptions for telecommunications access. Before this can happen the expectations of users needs to shift from contributing capital (paying for a mobile plan for instance) to contributing resources: running voluntary software on their machines.

The requirements needed to participate in mesh-networks are not just technical knowledge. If a user deployed a program like Briar they’d notice something rather swiftly: participating in mesh-networks demands more resources than not participating. The most obvious effect of this is that the mobile-computer’s battery will drain faster. Carrying a spare battery seems to be common already and that’s without participating in a voluntary mesh-network. The users’ expectations would need to shift before they could adopt such software.

I’ll refrain from commentary on Apple’s iOS (though I expect it to be similar), but Google’s Android is hostile towards user-software that needs to run constantly in the background. It will terminate those programs, even if the user has granted it ‘permission’ to run in the background.

Desktop and laptops provide a much more fertile environment in comparison. It is the norm to have long running user-programs. Even commercial operating-systems do not find anything amiss because it is the norm here. For the user in such an environment I do not see any possible objection to running such programs other than an increase in data usage, but even then these programs often allow for deployments that have a fixed quota.

Why then do we not see mass adoption of software like i2p, hyphanet, GNUnet and so forth? I exclude tor because it reinforces the status quo that must be changed. It allows its users to exit the tor-network and access the web. It’s a good technical precaution against network surveillance, but the majority of that network’s userbase want to exit the network. To contribute to the tor-network is to run an exit-node and that is not financially feasible for the vast majority of internet users. It is not democratic, but exclusionary and elitist. User-contributed nodes that run on the hardware they have, with the data connections they have, will see their nodes deprioritized in routing if not outright dropped. The other projects I’ve listed do prioritize peer-to-peer communication whilst tor’s network has just become a way to access the web anonymously. I2p is technically superior to tor’s for in-network communication; it supports tcp and udp. You can torrent within i2p’s network. You can not torrent in tor’s: you lose udp.

In my eyes the major issue of the current ‘web’ is the rent-seeking economy that upholds it. Technically we all have the tools to self-host a blog, e-mail, lemmy instance or whatever it is you want to share. We have a glut of cpu-capacity, storage and bandwidth. The hindrance isn’t in the property we own, but in the capital expenditure demanded from a perpetual rent-seeking economy that’s evolved around the ‘web’. Users are behind cgnats and need to rent whitelisted servers. Users aren’t allocated a static ipv4 address and need to rent one. Users then need to rent domain names and before Let’s Encrypt they had to pay for a SSL certificate that had an expiration date–a perpetual expense. Completely arbitrary, artificial scarcity to create an economic system of rents. It’s all absurd.

Software like lemmy isn’t revolutionary either. It’s retroactive. It wants to shift conditions back to when web-masters had privileges. Privileges that were taken away by the new-style of business that superseded them. If you want to run lemmy you need to pay your dues to the domain registrars and whitelisted server admins. The revolutionary act is to run i2p or gnunet and do whatever the fuck you want, but once you realize Alice and Bob can communicate with one another without paying tolls to DNS registrars or whitelisted server-admins nor subjugate themselves to that third-line–the forum administrators–lemmy becomes superfluous.

Users shift responsibility to the server-admins that run the lemmy instances they interact with. In exchange they give them all their content. That content has value. Lemmy is still a value extraction mechanism because everything on the ‘web’ has devolved into economic rent-seeking. To exist on the web is to participate in that system. It is the ‘web’ that needs to be ditched. Of the alternatives GNUnet is the design that makes the most sense, though it is still juvenile.