Yeah, rallying against SSL is a weird way to go about it. SSL is one of the biggest and most meaningful changes to come about as a result of the Snowden leaks. The leaks were literally what prompted http to shift towards https instead, because it shined a bright spotlight on how insecure http truly is.

In the short term, it made self-hosting more difficult. But nowadays, with things like nginx and Let’s Encrypt, enabling SSL on your self-hosted site is as simple as selecting a few drop-down boxes, pasting an API key, and automating a cert refresh.

The true “has the potential to gatekeep the entire internet” existential threat is when a company like Meta or Google becomes the authority for things like ID verification or SSO.