At the moment there is a big fuss about Internet video censorship, with several of the large platforms trying to kick certain opinions off the Internet. This should concern you even if you don’t like those particular opinions, because once censorship becomes common, anyone unpopular can be targeted.
Nobody worries too much about text censorship, because text can be easily saved to a file, forwarded in email, pasted into chat, and copied into discussion forums. Text is easy to copy and hard to censor.
Video is a powerful method of communication, but is currently easy to censor, because video platforms are centralized. People forward links, and the links tend to go away before recipients get to watch them. You can use ClipGrab to download video from the major platforms, but the resulting files are too large for regular email. Videos hosted directly on websites are likely to crash the site if the link goes viral, so most forums and blogs don’t let you upload large videos.
To prevent censorship, we need a way to send someone a video. Not just send a link, but actually send the video content to the person so that it cannot go away. Until recently there was no easy way to send a file over a few megabytes.
BitTorrent is good for few-to-many sharing of TV shows and movies, where there is an organized group seeding the videos, but it’s not a practical tool for person-to-person sharing. The sender would have to leave his computer running with a port open until the recipient finished downloading the video.
Many instant messaging services can send file attachments, but they are not reliable for large files, they lack privacy, and both users must be online for the duration of the transfer. Interrupted transfers cannot be resumed.
Confidant Mail is the solution to this problem. When you have your friends as CM contacts, and you want to show them a video, you just attach it and hit send. The recipient gets the file and can forward it freely. Third parties cannot censor specific videos, because they can’t see what you are sending. Users can move their accounts between CM servers without losing their identity or informing their contacts.
Confidant Mail is already being used to bypass video censorship and national firewalls. It makes videos as easy to share and forward as text and images. If you are worried about the large platforms being able to ban whatever they don’t like, install Confidant Mail and get your friends on it. You will no longer have to worry about other people deciding what you can see and share.