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by dvdkon 1393 days ago
What would happen if Twitter was a peer-to-peer FLOSS network? In our current world Twitter is a centralised product backed by a large company, but very little of its user-facing functionality could change and that would no longer be true. Such hypothetical P2P network would definitely have some kind of filtering, but it would likely not be network-wide and might not even be backed by a central entity (think more email anti-spam than moderation).
1 comments

In such a situation, the expectation about the content moderation would remain the same. Specifically, such a network should still disallow hate speech, actively seek it, remove it and ban users who repeatedly spread it.
Thing is, P2P networks are usually built to make this kind of blanket blocking/banning impossible. Mastodon is more distributed than P2P, but even then moderation only applies to one server. In this case, the operators of popular Pakistani servers could very well side against the author. In a more "pure P2P" setup, I could see users choosing which moderation authorities to follow, so there would be no way to do what you ask. (Most users still wouldn't see it, because who wants to see hate speech, but the choice would be on the users, and again the kind of people this smear campaign is aimed at might not have it hidden.)