[Blikkentrekker]

> moral and legal needs to censor content

I for one would love for there to be a decentralized system that by design makes it impossible to censor any content, and if the content would be stored in a decentralized, encrypted manner it would also be impossible to legally enforce it as it would not even easily be known where it would be stored at all.

Think of perhaps a network that retrieves its content viā an union-routing-esque mechanism where information is published that cannot feasibly be altered any more once put there whose origins and locations would be computationally infeasible to trace and as it's stored in an encrypted fashion the parts of the network that do store it do not even know what they are storing.

[posguy]

This exists, its called Freenet: https://freenetproject.org

Not a particularly new concept, Freenet has been around for over 20 years now. Tor and I2P have more traction in this segment.

[Blikkentrekker]

Sounds like an interesting thing; let's see whether there's some interesting content on it amidst all the child porn.

And sure enough, I already found a website that says: “Please note that the Freenet network (much like Tor) attracts pedophiles and a large amount of sites contain child pornography. Some sites jokingly add a disclaimer saying This site does not contain child pornography. click here to continue.”

[posguy]

Mhmm, hence why the Freenet proposition is a hard sell. The average person doesn't want to devote half their computer's storage space to storing encrypted data they have no insight into, especially when that data could be considered illicit in some jurisdictions when decrypted.

[Blikkentrekker]

I suppose the problem of such ideas is that it will generally be filled with content that is illegal in at least some jurisdictions and will only be used by those that need it to evade the law and the amount of content that isn't legal on it will be minimal.

So the end result is that all one finds on it is child pornography, controversial opinions, leaks of government data, and the lot.

I suppose my ideal wish was a platform such as twitter that intermixes legal and illegal content.

[tomjen3]

That is what stopped me, but it is also a check on society. If something else ends up on freenet that is not cp, it is an indicator of something having gone terribly wrong.

I didn't realize it then, but if Hunter Bidens data had been put there they would have been basically impossible to censor and it might have swayed the election.

[fsflover]

Freenet is designed for data storage, while I2P (https://geti2p.net) provides any service on top of the anonymizing network.

[zbentley]

While those do exist (and plenty of them), many people avoid them precisely because content moderation isn't possible or regularly done in those communities. From people who prefer not to sift through egregious amounts of bigotry/spam, to people who are at very real risk of having their physical safety or livelihoods damaged by online abuse (e.g. children), there are plenty of reasons to avoid those communities--reasons why those platforms are often ghost towns or toxic echo chambers.

Like, this isn't a "think of the children" argument that those communities shouldn't be allowed to exist. Of course they should. But don't be surprised when people prefer more centralized and "censored" (policed/moderated) communities. For the vast majority of people, that is a feature, not a bug--and they tend to realize that and boomerang back to Twitter etc. when they try out decentralized/anticensorship-oriented alternatives.

[Blikkentrekker]

Usually when a man speaks out against censorship, he tends to still want to censor whatever he finds abhorrent himself.

A rather big difference is also the relatively lower level of activity on those alternatives.