| I wonder if there will ever be an answer to this question, at least in regards to free services on the internet[0]. Centralized services will always have incentives that are orthogonal to their users, because anyone who isn't paying for a product with cash is "paying" by allowing their data to be harvested. They may provide strong moderation at their discretion, but that will never be one-size-fits-all (see: the bipartisan section 230 repeal arguments in the US) - there's not a balance here that people won't find a way to politicize. Federated protocols create perverse incentives to lock in users so they can't switch providers and to differentiate their service from neighbours using non-standard protocol deviations. These moves create insular communities where self-hosted participants are left out to dry through entirely defensible actions such as spam prevention systems (like big email providers junking/refusing to deliver mail from "untrustworthy" sources). Even relatively new protocols are wrestling with this problem - Matrix recently put out a document discussing a federated reputation system for servers to judge other servers. This will inevitably turn them into pseudo-centralized protocols, like email is today. Decentralized protocols, like the ones in the article, are filled with all the people who've been banned from the centralized servers and kicked out by federated server admins. It's not surprising to me in the least that decentralized servers host objectionable content; without any meaningful form of network-wide moderation you have no way to cut out the bad actors from your network's discovery mechanisms. Anything approaching network-wide moderation would rely on some kind of network topology approaching a federated system. I think part of it might be that humans are just inherently horrible. Not all of us, and not all the time, but enough to ruin the experience for everyone. I suppose it was easier when our ancestors lived in tribes of a couple of hundred individuals, but now that the entire globe is a text message away we're coming to grips with the fact that there's far more "objectionable" material out there than we previously thought. As with other problems of human nature, I don't think the problem or the resulting solution will come from tech alone. Rather, I imagine it'll take society as a whole a few decades to come to grips with the fact that everything is public for everyone, and power in the real world doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot on the internet. [0] Paid services obviously have a different calculus ascribed to them, but with the way the internet has evolved there's a prerequisite discussion to be had about whether paid services will be able to catch on in the world today. Social networks, for example, rely on network effects, which are (to my understanding) a non-starter if your service isn't free. This is especially true if prices aren't adjusted for the developing world where people have even less discretionary income than in, say, California. |