Combating abuse without backdoors
Presumably, the writing is on the wall. One of the driving forces of spinning up my own Matrix community for me and my friends is the Facebook wouldn't let us discuss firearms without heavy censorship.My fear with this is that it will turn into something like Reddit, where participating in one community automatically bans you from other communities, regardless of the content and context of your reputation. Especially when the predominant server is matrix.org. What, if any, measures are in place to prevent any one server from becoming overwhelmingly popular and then bullying everyone else? That could be detrimental to the discovery and growth of smaller communities that are viewed as controversial by bigger ones. If you associate with them, you risk being ostracized by other important communities, and barred from other important conversations. I think that's a net negative for the entire ecosystem.I see the necessity of this, and I appreciate the Matrix team's attempt to provide an alternate solution and avoid governmental oversight, but this is just going to delay the issue, because we all know this isn't about catching child predators. Governments want to break encryption because they are after power. A reputation system won't stop them for long.I'm very sad to see this development, and to me it seems like something far from what my understanding of the mission of Matrix was. I say all this with respect and gratitude for Matrix, which to me is one of the most important developments of the internet this century.