> There are so many ways this law can go wrong, and so many ways it can be expanded from here to shut down the projects you think it's helping.

It'd have to be expanded by a ridiculous amount. To the point where it's practically speaking illegal for anyone to run non-approved software on their computers, if it can send messages over the internet. I'm not saying they wouldn't try that, but in practice it's completely unrealistic. Which means, at best, it'll be a law that criminalizes everyone and nobody really cares.

Hilariously, the same tech behemoths that people give up their freedom to are doing everything they can to push us into the same exact situation, with their walled gardens and power asymmetry that allows them to squeeze out competition.

> But this is painfully naive; a pseudo-requirement to backdoor communications will make it harder to build Open platforms and onboard users, because no commercial host will want to touch a platform that exposes them to liability.

If you play your cards right, these "platforms" are more like internet routers and load balancers that facilitate message exchange between computers. You build your platform on top of this technology. Banning the technology would be akin to banning TCP/IP+TLS or UDP+DTLS. I don't see hosting providers having a case for banning encrypted transport protocols. And the law in question doesn't go that far; again, for it to go there we'd need a law that virtually bans all encrypted message exchange on the internet.

> What happens when the Matrix org tries to set up a free server to onboard new users and the government prosecutes them?

Once decentralization becomes a thing techies care about because they need it, I'm sure we can spread software by word of mouth just like we did back in the early days of Kazaa, DC++, Torrents, etcetra. In fact that's pretty much how software gets adopted today. You only need faddy & flashy onboarding when you're trying to growth hack a product that has no intrinsic demand for it. We'd be way past that point.

> What happens when every user running a Tor exit node becomes liable for content traced back to that IP?

That's already something you should worry about if you're about to run a Tor exit node. I don't recommend it.

Exit nodes are just bowing down to the centralized clearnet. A proper decentralized network is one where the exchange stays within, and doesn't rely on a single point source as a hosting node that can be taken down. If a message is in the network, it can be anywhere, and it can and will replicate itself if requested.

> What on earth makes you think the DOJ won't prosecute hosts of Open services?

The easy way out for them is that everyone uses the same handful of services provided by a handful of tech behemoths. Then they only need to prosecute those, if they don't play along. That's largely where we've been headed, and I think it really sucks, because I lose my freedom and privacy both to these tech companies as well as their government.

If individual people started participating in a network and hosting their own nodes, the situation becomes much harder. If they seriously tried to prosecute everyone, it'd end up being much like the neverending war on drugs (or piracy or similar). Except that in this case, you wouldn't be up against just potheads and kids downloading movies, you'd also be up against professionals (and not only in tech) keeping their comms confidential. But everyone, individually, is a small fry, so fighting a legal battle against everyone is very nonproductive, unlike slapping one megacorp with millions in fines they can actually pay.

The status quo is terrifying, and it is not getting better because even technical users are too lazy to care if they don't have to. If I move to decentralized services that try to provide freedom and anonymity, I'm just isolating myself from everything else and simultaneously painting a target on my back. That's because these things do not have enough mindshare, and they will never have enough mindshare when techies just encourage everyone to keep using google & fb & co.