| This has been tried in various forms, and always fails for a few reasons: - Spam. When the cost of bandwidth goes to zero, the most useless freeloaders are enabled with no negative consequences for their pollution. - Media storage. There is a huge demand for storage of (pirated) movies, tv, music or video games, which sucks up the vast bulk of volume. Entertainment needs monopolize communication resources to the detriment of knowledge preservation and freedom of expression. - Legal and other liability. Aside from the piracy, there's child porn, private information, politically sensitive topics, etc. Society wants an accountability mechanism and will destroy or discredit platforms that lack it. Commercial silos tend to address all three. Social media in particular is effective at #1 by leveraging the social graph as a filtering and reputation system. Which means once people are invested in their profile or channel, you can wield it as leverage to ensure compliance with #2 or #3. There are still huge pieces missing to do this in a decentralized and federated way. For starters, a reputation and identity system that is not fully public and transitive. And also, a return to the willingness to tolerate violations of #2 and #3 on a local scale for the sake of intellectual freedom, which the contemporary web sorely lacks. Email isn't even an exception. Becoming a reputable sender is hard, the data volume is still limited, and the privacy protection is laughable in the wild. |