The point of having nukes is to threaten destruction of an enemy even at the cost of one’s own destruction. Analysts understand that actually using nuclear weapons benefits no one. Nukes don’t benefit the party that launches nukes upon event X taking place, the party that causes event X, or most bystanders. Saying that any party responsible for event X will be nuked is intended to ensure that event X doesn’t occur. Threats are not reality: threatening retaliation is not the same as actually retaliating.

Some facts have been simplified in this reply. Reality is more complicated but these basic principles do seem to hold most of the time.

A Layer-3 (network-layer) blacklist risks cutting off innocent CGNAT and cloud users. What you’re proposing is similar to mechanisms that already exist (e.g., access control lists at the ISP level work by asking computer B which requests it wants to reject and rejecting those that originate from computer A). However, implementing any large-scale blocking effort beyond the endpoint (i.e. telling an unrelated computer C to blackhole all requests from computer A to computer B) would be too computationally expensive for a use case as wide and as precise as “every computer on the Internet”.

Also, in your post you mentioned, “A host would need to have a way to identify itself as authoritative, responsible for the IP address in question.” This already happens in the form of BGP though it doesn’t provide cryptographic proof of ownership unless additional mechanisms are in use (RPKI/ROA).

I agree Melania can be seen as a passive participant. I never objected to you being critical of her. Instead, my issue was with the reason you gave, which compares survivors of sexual abuse to an embodiment of evil. That comparison is deeply offensive to people who were abused. Calling my response “virtue signaling” misreads me: I genuinely found your message hurtful.

There were many people who experienced Trump, Epstein etc. “cumming in them” through no fault of their own. Please don’t compare survivors of sexual abuse to an entity that many associate with evil.

Even in an “insecure” app without air-gapped systems or manual encryption, creating a backdoor to access plaintext messages is still very difficult if the app is well audited, open source, and encrypts messages with the recipient’s public key or a symmetric key before sending ciphertext to a third-party server.

If you trust the client-side implementation and the mathematics behind the symmetric and asymmetric algorithms, messages remains secure even if the centralized server is compromised. The client-side implementation can be verified by inspecting the source code if the app is open source and the device is trusted (for example, there is no ring-zero vulnerability).

The key exchange itself remains somewhat vulnerable if there is no other secure channel to verify that the correct public keys were exchanged. However, once the public keys have been correctly exchanged, the communication is secure.

The problem is that there is nothing meaningful you can exchange this currency for. The Fediverse is fundamentally designed to allow anyone to start a server. There is no meaningful way to reward someone with anything of value except the satisfaction of having helped grow the instance they are supporting. There is no good way to boost someone without manipulating the vote count or changing the protocol itself. Many apps already offer customizability while simultaneously being free as in free beer and free as in free speech. The main reason many people move to the Fediverse is to escape an internet where everything is “enshittified,” and most Fediverse users wouldn’t want to shift to a proprietary model.