I don’t think it’s more crime because more tension. It’s instead a self fulfilling prophecy. Who do you think detects and records crime if not the police? Therefore more police in a area increases the number of crime data points in that area.

One field it impacts is radio astronomy. We can already see Musk’s satellites mess with it (unintentionally) and it’s probably only going to get worse from here.

Assuming each user will always encrypt to the same value, this still loses to statistical attacks.

As a simple example, users are e.g. more likely to vote on threads they comment in. With data reaching back far enough, people who exhibit “normal” behavior will be identified with high certainty.

I wanna add to what other users already answered that this problem is not created by federation, only exacerbated.

If I’m mod of a community and I ban your [email protected] account, I cannot stop you from creating, e.g. [email protected] and coming back. Most servers have some barriers against spam account creation in place, but I’d wager you could easily create a handful of accounts on a server until they start to grip.

Even completely centralized platforms such as Twitter and Reddit are the same. You can easily ban/block evade a couple times per timeframe.

Whcih makes sense when explained, but it seems like few hear that kind of comparison.

And then you bring up defederation and/or how instances can die at any time and you lose them again…

At least that’s how it usually goes for me and trying to advertise Lemmy. Not really a fan of “microblogging” to begin with no matter the platform.