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It sounds like you’re slightly mis-remembering this oft-cited Hacker News comment from Moxie from 2015. I’m going to quote the main bit here because honestly a lot of people in this thread could stand to think about it:
If we were going to rank our priorities, they would be in this order:
Make mass surveillance impossible.
Stop targeted attacks against crypto nerds.
It’s not that we don’t find #2 laudable, but optimizing for #1 takes precedence when we’re making decisions.
This isn’t really specific to federated software. The client can go offline but the server can’t. Same applies to all centralized services. The only place this really applies is for decentralized (as in, no central points) systems, and those tend to have a lot of special sauce to make other people being offline less painful