[drasticmeasures]

This kind of decentralisation -- taking existing platforms controlled by megacorps and making them P2P...

...feels, to me, like a huge mistake.

How would one eliminate hate speech and toxic content from it? Or illegal content? Or anything you put there and need removed to keep living your life freely? The technologists developing this tech hand-wave these concerns away citing "freedom of speech" -- but one's freedom ends where another's begins, and hate speech, toxic content, illegal content, not being able to have what you said or did forgotten online, all these things curtail someone's freedom.

And by making it decentralised, they're just making it harder for people who are the victims of these problems to hold the people responsible accountable and to stop them. These technologists want freedom of speech at the expense of everyone else's freedom.

[zzzcpan]

> How would one eliminate

You simply make your own choices and don't follow/subscribe/view all that illegal, toxic, hate content. You know, the same way you do today by not visiting all those illegal, toxic, hate websites. They still exists though for those who don't share your views on policing content for other people.

[drasticmeasures]

Ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away for the victims.

The women whose boyfriends posted private sex pictures as revenge, or the minorities who will be the victims of hate groups organizing on social media, the children who were filmed while being raped and have their video circulating online, the victims of bullying whose bullies are empowered by other people seeing it and not doing anything to stop them...

You can choose to ignore this when you see it, but the victims can't, and it's for their freedom that I'm concerned for.

[zzzcpan]

But you are advocating exactly that - ignoring the problem by blocking content instead of dealing with people engaging in those behaviors.

[Faark]

Yeah, its kind of ridiculous having e.g. the german government expect Facebook what posts are and then delete hate speech and co. If that stuff is illegal, then the persons doing so should be held accountable by our legal system. But politicians love using those companies as easy scape goat. Anyway, p2p solutions usually try to make finding a person to hold accountable harder than current centralized services.

[lucozade]

As you say, you can ignore this content today. And yet the authorities still feel obliged to make access to child pornography etc illegal. There is no reason to believe that changing the platform would change this stance.

Just because it can't be dealt with by threatening the odd CEO or two, doesn't mean that it won't be dealt with some other way. Now, it may be the case that governments react to a change like this and just accept that they can't control terrorism, child porn etc etc. But it would be astonishingly naive to assume that that's the most likely outcome.

[buboard]

That is an important point but kind of orthogonal to P2P. A popular P2P website, say DTube could delegate its moderation to some group of "censors", and have some of its listings removed. Besides, unmoderated spam/trolling-infested sites are not going to become very popular anyway. Now you surely can't completely remove content that has been distributed but you can condemn it to be forgotten. 'Organic' forgetting may actually be easier in distributed web because sharing of content is generally temporary - just like you can no longer find older movies seeded in torrent sites.

[snaky]

> toxic content

What is considered toxic for you might not be considered toxic by another person. That's personal choice. If you need to eliminate some sort of content, that inevitably will lead to this https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-internet/china-laun...