There's only so much information you can get with hardware though. No doubt the software in tracking fingerprints, and matching similar ones has become very sophisticated. However, I wouldn't be surprised if device fingerprints hasnt increased in diversity much.
On the other hand, maybe they're using a spectre/meltdown attack to get a MAC address or something. In that case, we're fucked.
In 2010, Electronic Frontier Foundation launched a website where visitors can test their browser fingerprint.[14] After collecting a sample of 470161 fingerprints, they measured at least 18.1 bits of entropy possible from browser fingerprinting,[15] but that was before the advancements of canvas fingerprinting, which claims to add another 5.7 bits.
If I'm understanding that correctly, that would give 14.6 million unique fingerprints just based on your browser. That's a lot, but also tiny compared to the billions of Meta users. I'm a little skeptical that they would be able to determine a user is from the EU without using IP or cookies.
Edit: If they block users who's fingerprint matches an EU user, and their IP comes from a known VPN service, then they could likely get pretty good accuracy. I wonder if there are any North Americans getting blocked while using a VPN.
Who's going to be paid for the ongoing maintenance of the software? Who's going to pay for the servers the software's run on? A decentralized architecture doesn't remove the operating costs of a large scale social media site. As the article alludes to, it might even increase operating costs.
To be honest, I'm not interested in small, niche communities. I want the fediverse to grow into something that can rival social media giants like Reddit, and Twitter. How a site is monetized is as key of a feature as anything else, because without monetization, a site is doomed.
So how is Kbin going to cover its operating costs? If a fediverse server must survive on donations, it seems like donating should be built into the user experience. For example, there could be a Kbin Gold similar to Reddit Gold.
I remember years ago when Reddit Gold first became a thing there was a progress bar on the site indicating how much of their daily server costs had been covered by Reddit Gold. Something like that might be useful.
There's only so much information you can get with hardware though. No doubt the software in tracking fingerprints, and matching similar ones has become very sophisticated. However, I wouldn't be surprised if device fingerprints hasnt increased in diversity much.
On the other hand, maybe they're using a spectre/meltdown attack to get a MAC address or something. In that case, we're fucked.