Let’s say I live under an oppressive regime (don’t we all?) How can I use social media anonymously, so I don’t face reprisals from the government?
Mastodon, Lemmy, Reddit and other social media platforms restrict users who connect through TOR or a VPN.
Is there any way I can create an account on these services and use them anonymously?
Thanks in advance for any information and advice you can provide.
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If you live in an oppresive regime, there isn’t any posibility to use anonymously an social media, there the only possibility is using a P2P communication system, eg. https://securebit.chat/ or similar. All other, like Lemmy or other from the fediverse are traceable, even with VPN or even not accessible in such regimes with heavy controled servers.
Not a fan of the marketing speak on that page, as a cryptography nerd there’s a lot of questionable stuff.
SAS authentication is stone cold dead in the LLM age. P2P with friends is trivially trackable by the ISP and can easily map who knows who. ECDSA isn’t “industry leading”, that would be EdDSA or something based on Risetto, or a pq algorithm like ML-DSA
The choice of cryptographic primitives in Securebit was made based on a balance between maturity, availability, and implementation simplicity at the time of the current architecture design. The goal was not to introduce experimental or fragile constructions, but to rely on well-studied, widely deployed primitives that are available across standard cryptographic libraries and can be audited and replaced as the protocol evolves. The system is intentionally designed to be modular. Cryptographic components are not treated as fixed marketing claims, but as replaceable building blocks. This is important because in real-world systems, cryptography evolves, and protocol agility is more valuable than locking into specific primitives. If there are concrete proposals for improving the cryptographic layer - including modern primitives, protocol adjustments, or security model refinements - contributions are welcome. The project is open to review and discussion via the GitHub repository.
Only mildly sarcastic, but even if you’re trying to be careful, you reveal a lot about yourself by making comments at all or interacting with a community at all. Your interests, your writing style, your browser footprint, etc. etc. It’s very difficult to not be truly unique if someone out there is purposefully tracking you as an individual. Depending on where the instance is hosted, they may be required to keep server logs and may further be required to divulge those to police for lawful investigations. “Lawful” obviously can vary widely in interpretation, depending on local corruption levels. I know that if I was of interest in an investigation it would not be hard at all to link me to my real identity, and I just sort of live with that.
It’s very difficult to not be truly unique if someone out there is purposefully tracking you as an individual.
And the neat part about that is… it used to be very expensive to do it. Now it blew right on through free, and into highly profitable. So it can be done to everyone everywhere at every moment.
No one knows how many people the Nazis employed to spy on the rest. Some estimates are like 1/4 of the population spied on the others! Today? We can put that to shame using only 0.01% or w/e of our population to spies on the rest. B/c that 0.01% has surveilance tools unimaginably powerful compared to anything the Nazis dreamed about.
There is a place in the world for targeted surveilance of bad people, mass murders, drug kingpins, w/e. You get a judge to sign off, and go to town. But dragnet surveilance of everyone at all times erodes the foundation of free societies.
