Living with the surveillance state

The data is already being uploaded, no?

Also it does not need to be a all or nothing situation. If you don't care about controlling your information then you can use whatever service. Right now all the social media stuff is 'walled gardens'. If you do things P2P and open protocols then anybody can provide any service they like and users can use whatever software they like.

Also the amount of data that people like Facebook save in their 'big data' clusters is a hell of a lot more than people actually care about or want shared. If all you want shared is your posts or pictures or links to this or that then that really isn't a whole lot.

> For a distributed community network, not only friends are required, but enough well-connected (in this case, technically) friends. That's an additional hurdle to clear.

Yes. This is the big problem.

Needs to be something like Email, that is very distributed, but have a built in way to make sure the communication is always coming from the same person/persons.

The actual identity of the person controlling the account can be confirmed or discovered through side channels if that really matters to you and the person you are communicating with. Just have to make sure that the messages are unadulterated and whatnot.

> An other problem is that if we accept that some surveillance is reasonable, the government will want to have a backdoor and then we're back to square one - what if the three letter agencies abuse the backdoor?

Screw them. I don't think that surveillance is reasonable, but I do think it's unavoidable. As long as governments continue to give these bozos money they will continue to use it to undermine our security. But that's their problem. So let them figure out how to do their job. They don't need our or anybody else's help.