It doesn’t necessarily have to be enforcable to deter most people. At minimum, with such a ban there’s zero chance to communicate with government agencies with E2EE.
Well, technically, they could MITM the traffic similarly to how they did to jabber . ru. But a) there are mitigations for this and b) more importantly - they would need to bother. No one’s going to bother doing it to a random family server that has attracted no previous attention.
I don’t think any ban on such selfhostable servers is enforceable at all.
What if the government shuts off the app source (and source code) and makes it illegal for anyone to download or redistribute it?
It doesn’t necessarily have to be enforcable to deter most people. At minimum, with such a ban there’s zero chance to communicate with government agencies with E2EE.
well in the end it’s just HTTPS traffic… police has to search your phone to know if you are a user.
but if you federate (on clearnet), that could give away that you host it
Well, technically, they could MITM the traffic similarly to how they did to jabber . ru. But a) there are mitigations for this and b) more importantly - they would need to bother. No one’s going to bother doing it to a random family server that has attracted no previous attention.