[Nursie]

It's always amazing to me to hear assumptions that decentralisation is a feature in and of itself.

For most people it's an entirely secondary concern, not a concern at all or even an anti-feature.

Who do I appeal to, to take down that cyber-bullying material? How do I get my transaction reversed, as the victim of fraud? What do you mean I can't and the system was deliberately designed that way?

[speedplane]

> It's always amazing to me to hear assumptions that decentralisation is a feature.

Decentralization is not a feature for the end-user, it's a feature to developers. It's probably impossible for a new social network to take on Twitter, Facebook, etc. directly. However, a decentralized social network allows startups to move far quickly and implement other features that the big social networks are lacking.

I suspect that whatever social network eventually pushes out the dominant players today, will use tools like these.

One good precedent for this is AOL. AOL was safer and more user-friendly than the world-wide-web, but the web's decentralized nature allowed competitors to spring up much more quickly. I suspect something similar will eventually happen to today's social networks.

[lokedhs]

> Decentralization is not a feature for the end-user, it's a feature to developers.

On one hand you are right, it's a huge benefit to developers as they are able to create new services that leverage the strength of the existing network. Such as Peertube getting subscription and commenting features from other servers for free, and it “just works”. Imagine a youtube competitor wanting to leverage Twitter in the same way. Highly unlikely that it would be allowed, and even if it did, the integration would be Twitter-specific.

On the other hand, (at least some) end-users see decentralisation as a huge benefit, and at least in my case it gives me confidence that the whim of a single company can't ruin the experience for me, or even take away the platform altogether.

Most people may not consider this, but some people definitely do. And hopefully that number will increase over time.

[Nursie]

Whilst I appreciate your views, for many/most the idea that no party can affect or take down the content is a negative.

"Nobody can censor us!"

is absolutely, unfortunately equivalent to -

"Nobody can take down race hatred, online harassment, child abuse images or other evil shit"

And we've adequate evidence now to show that humans will use such platforms to post exactly that sort of stuff. For instance one of the bitcoin forks that allows larger data payloads had child abuse images uploaded to it, in an immutable, permanent way. Many/most people are not OK with that.

I'm not yet seeing a way to balance these concerns.

[speedplane]

> Whilst I appreciate your views, for many/most the idea that no party can affect or take down the content is a negative.

Just b/c something is decentralized doesn't mean you can't take it down or hide it.

[feanaro]

Exactly. Even a centralized filtering mechanism can be curated by the community. The important point is that each server gets to decide whether to use it. If a user considers their server is not doing a good enough job with this, they simply move to another server.

[Nursie]

That's not a solution for illegal or harassing content.

[Mirioron]

In the grand scheme of things censorship is the more dangerous thing though. People often don't care about censorship until it affects them, but once it does, they care a lot. There's a reason why the first amendment protects speech. It's the building block for an improving society.

[Nursie]

As far as I'm aware, the first amendment doesn't protect the distribution of child abuse images, or allow harassment, etc.

So we already have lines on 'speech'.

I agree, censorship can be sinister, but I disagree that it's so sinister that we have to allow everything for fear of allowing nothing. Society already doesn't work that way.

[feanaro]

> As far as I'm aware, the first amendment doesn't protect the distribution of child abuse images, or allow harassment, etc.

Yes, but those are already illegal. That does not (or at the very least should not) mean politicians get to dictate what kind of technology is allowed. You cannot outlaw a technology (or require a backdoor) simply because it may not support deletion as a feature by virtue of being decentralized.

[lokedhs]

I'm mostly ambivalent to the censorship debate. What I mean by that is that I can see valid points on both sides.

Most Mastodon instances have pretty strict policies with regards to the speech that is allowed on them. Many instances block federation with other instances whose policies they don't agree with.

Other instances allow pretty much everything (they are usually called “free speech zones”). The result is what you would expect, and they end up being mostly blocked.

I'd argue that it works reasonably well for now (but it may of course change if the Fediverse grows further). Everybody is allowed to say what they want on the Fediverse, but others are not forced to listen to it.

[feanaro]

> Whilst I appreciate your views, for many/most the idea that no party can affect or take down the content is a negative.

Citation needed, please. This really sounds like your personal opinion presented as a general statement.

[Nursie]

Look at the news. Look at the outcry over teen suicides and how facebook/twitter didn't do enough to protect them. Look at the laws around child abuse imagery and how much popular support they get.

It's not just my opinion.

[DanBC]

I agree. Here's the current Secretary of State for the Department of Health and Social Care in England: https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1089864139835670528

He's the most tech-focussed minister we have. He's pushing tech pretty hard, so for him to be saying this should be a clear signal to the industry.

See also the consultationn for the online harms white paper: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/online-harms-whi...

It's really weird that this extremist position ("any removal of content is censorship, and censorship is always bad") is so prominent on HN whenusers of products have shown, every single time, they they don't want it.

[feanaro]

I'm looking at the news but I'm not reaching the same conclusions.

Public opinion heavily depends on context and evolves continually. Of course people are going to get behind the idea of preventing teen suicides, particularly when it seems that the solution might be preventing a huge, corporate giant do as it pleases.

Given the context of government censorship, which is happening and is likely to increase and become a larger problem in the future, and myriads of smaller, independent entities, people might react differently.

In any case, I don't think it's a good nor strong enough argument to abandon decentralization and anti-censorship efforts.