> It'd have to be expanded by a ridiculous amount.

> If you play your cards right, these "platforms" are more like internet routers and load balancers that facilitate message exchange between computers.

I think it's important to point out that your model of how a decentralized world should work isn't the current reality or even direction that most projects in this area are going. In the Fediverse we heavily rely on homeservers/instances that coordinate with each other. Tor is the only completely blind system that springs to my mind right now, because it turns out that for a lot of stuff (Peertube, Matrix, Mastodon, Email, PixelFed, etc...) instances are a really good, scalable solution.

What that means is that if you run a popular Peertube/Mastodon/Matrix instance, you're in the same legal position as YouTube/Twitter/Slack. This law will apply to you in its current form without any exansion. If a public Mastodon server has E2E encrypted messages, they're in the exact same situation as Twitter. If a PeerTube instance isn't doing whatever scanning the DOJ decides is the standard, then they're in the same situation as Youtube.

The only hope you have is that these instances will be small enough that the DOJ won't care. But of course the DOJ will care. This law is an effort to block encryption. The only reason the DOJ doesn't currently care about these systems is because nobody uses them. If everyone migrated to Matrix today, the DOJ would absolutely start prosecuting individual servers just to make an example of them. Because the entire point is to scare people away from using encryption. The DOJ will care about wherever people go.

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> You only need faddy & flashy onboarding when you're trying to growth hack a product that has no intrinsic demand for it.

And on the subject of popular homeservers, my Matrix example wasn't theoretical. Matrix's current free homeserver is doing a ton of really valuable work in this space to onboard new users right now, because setting up servers is stinking hard. See also Mastodon, which got a huge amount of early traction because there was a way for ordinary people to quickly join.

I run my own Peertube instance, I'm working on setting up Matrix servers for communities that I host. But in the meantime, I'm coordinating my family on Matrix's "official-ish" homeserver. This stuff is genuinely useful if you want to get ordinary people interested in decentralized systems -- it's not just marketing fluff. Nobody's going to install a server to try out Matrix. They're going to create an account on an existing service, sign up for an existing community, and then once they get used to the protocol they might migrate their identity/communities to a new self-hosted homeserver.

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> It'd have to be expanded by a ridiculous amount.

> Once decentralization becomes a thing techies care about because they need it

All the stuff I said above is kind of a side discussion. Here's the main problem with your philosophy:

If you really want to argue purely on the merits of this bill in isolation, and you want to argue that we can take away a few freedoms and it won't quickly become a slippery slope, and that the DOJ won't make the exact same arguments about hosts like Linode, fine. But in the world you describe, E2E encryption is not something that most techies will care about. It's something that privacy advocates will care about, but privacy advocates are a minority.

If Facebook got rid of E2E encryption in WhatsApp, and none Facebook's competitors like Signal were able to roll it out either, people would not migrate off of Facebook onto distributed alternatives. They'd shrug their shoulders and go on with their lives. It would not trigger the mass exodus you want. So if you genuinely believe that the DOJ isn't going to go farther than this bill and they're not going to use it as a springboard to lock down encryption in general, then it's still a bad bill -- because it's not currently restrictive enough to get ordinary people (or even technical people) off of Instagram or Twitter.

If you're a techy, and you can't get your friends to switch from Twitter to Mastodon right now, even when Mastodon has objectively better user-freedom guarantees, better privacy, better data export tools, better moderation tools, better APIs, a more responsive development team, and more focused communities -- do you really think Mastodon rolling out E2E encrypted DMs would be enough to make those friends switch?

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> If they seriously tried to prosecute everyone, it'd end up being much like the neverending war on drugs (or piracy or similar).

Quick side note, these are really bad examples. The war on drugs has been awful. The war on piracy has been awful. I don't think it's reasonable to look at the war on piracy and say, "this has actually helped Internet freedom when you think about it." The war on piracy has been used to clamp down on ordinary people's speech, it's killed entire businesses, it's greatly reduced adoption of torrent technology for ordinary people. Sure, torrents have still survived, for some people. Yes, people still break the law and pirate media. But the situation we're in today has not been improved by making piracy into a felony; the Digital Millennium Copyright Act isn't something that Open Source advocates like.

The current laws you allude to have real, negative consequences, and they are aggressively wielded against advocates. Ordinary people have had their lives ruined as an example to the rest of us, and that has a chilling effect on the Internet as a whole. Think about people like Aaron Schwartz, effectively killed by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Selectively enforced laws that can be easily brought down on specific targets are far more terrifying than anything Facebook is doing today.

For whatever it's worth, I am pretty optimistic about the future of decentralization and federation; I am realistic and pragmatic about the work required, but I don't share your cynicism. I think that for people paying attention to this space, the status quo is currently getting better (slowly but surely). We don't need to slide towards totalitarianism to speed things up. Always remember that the goal isn't decentralization; it's user freedom. Decentralization is a means to an end. So again, it is counterproductive to take away user freedom in the pursuit of decentralization.