Unless you plan on broadcasting a flood of messages per day I don't see how this is a problem. If you send a broadcast, an unlimited number of people can receive it and none of the recipients do any PoW to receive. Ditto for chans and decentralized mailing lists.
The use case for Bitmessage is strong anonymity and then censorship resistance. Bitmessage is uncensorable. When you send a message the recipient will receive the message no matter how much attackers try to infiltrate or flood the network.
if you want to help people access the full, uncensored internet via Tor, and you're a fedi admin, here's a way you can help. you may know about Tor Bridges and how they're used by people behind repressive governments that censor the internet to safely access the net. countries like China or Russia block the public list of Tor relays, for example.
WebTunnel is a Bridge method that uses a reverse proxy that you configure using your existing nginx (etc) web server that points to your server's local tor daemon. so your fedi instance can be a bridge to the Tor network for people who cannot connect to Tor normally. disobey.net is hosting one ^^
one thing to note is that it's important to disable nginx (etc) web server logs, since the people who use bridges are connecting to you as their first, trusted hop onto the tor network. something to keep in mind to maximize privacy and reduce your own liability.
#SocialMedia#Misinformation#ConspiracyTheories#Disinformation#Anonymity: "The incident sheds light on how social media accounts that shield the identities of the people or groups behind them through clever slogans and cartoon avatars have come to dominate right-wing political discussion online even as they spread false information.
The accounts enjoy a massive reach that is boosted by engagement algorithms, by social media companies greatly reducing or eliminating efforts to remove phony or harmful material, and by endorsements from high-profile figures such as Musk. They also can generate substantial financial rewards from X and other platforms by ginning up outrage against Democrats.
Many such internet personalities identify as patriotic citizen journalists uncovering real corruption. Yet their demonstrated ability to spread misinformation unchecked while disguising their true motives worries experts with the United States in a presidential election year.
They are exploiting a long history of trust in American whistleblowers and anonymous sources, said Samuel Woolley, director of the Propaganda Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.
“With these types of accounts, there’s an allure of covertness, there’s this idea that they somehow might know something that other people don’t,” he said. “They’re co-opting the language of genuine whistleblowing or democratically inclined leaking. In fact what they’re doing is antithetical to democracy.”"
"After his exhibit closed, the postcards took over Frank’s life. Hundreds poured into his mailbox, week after week. He decided to create a website, PostSecret, where every Sunday he uploaded images of postcards he’d received in the mail." —Meg Bernhard for Hazlitt
#Privacy#Glassdoor#Anonymity: "Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week.
"Time to delete your Glassdoor account and data," Monica, a Midwest-based software professional, warned other Glassdoor users in a blog. (Ars will only refer to Monica by her first name so that she can speak freely about her experience using Glassdoor to review employers.)
Monica joined Glassdoor about 10 years ago, she said, leaving a few reviews for her employers, taking advantage of other employees' reviews when considering new opportunities, and hoping to help others survey their job options. This month, though, she abruptly deleted her account after she contacted Glassdoor support to request help removing information from her account. She never expected that instead of removing information, Glassdoor's support team would take the real name that she provided in her support email and add it to her Glassdoor profile—despite Monica repeatedly and explicitly not consenting to Glassdoor storing her real name." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/glassdoor-adding-users-real-names-job-info-to-profiles-without-consent/
"Glassdoor now requires your real name and will add it to older accounts without your consent if they learn it, and your only option is to delete your account."
#UK#Healthcare#NHS#Privacy#Anonymity#Palantir: "Opensafely has its own database query language, built on SQL, but tailored to medical research. Researchers write programs in this language to extract aggregate data from each NHS trust's servers, posing medical questions of the data without ever directly touching it. These programs are published in advance on a git server, and are preflighted on synthetic NHS data on a test server. Once the program is approved, it is sent to the main Opensafely server, which then farms out parts of the query to each NHS trust, packages up the results, and publishes them to a public repository.
This is better than "the best of both worlds." This public scientific process, with peer review and disclosure built in, allows for frequent, complex analysis of NHS data without giving a single third party access to a a single patient record, ever. Opensafely was wildly successful: in just months, Opensafely collaborators published sixty blockbuster papers in Nature – science that shaped the world's response to the pandemic.
Opensafely was so successful that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care commissioned a review of the programme with an eye to expanding it to serve as the nation's default way of conducting research on medical data:
(...)
This approach is cheaper, safer, and more effective than handing hundreds of millions of pounds to Palantir and hoping they will manage the impossible: anonymising data well enough that it is never re-identified."