[DoItToMe81]

Section 230 prevents small hosts from going to jail because somebody illicitly used their site for pirate uploads or illegal speech. Don't be naive. No section 230 means no 'small internet', because anybody can get you criminally charged.

The removal of comparative protections in the UK is why British web communities collapsed, from small forums to huge communities like Liveleak. We shouldn't pretend this is good.

[saurik]

This is nonsensical. First off, if someone illicitly uses your site for something Section 230 isn't what is protecting you from that: if I hack into your computers and inject a bunch of content onto it, you aren't somehow more liable than if I went to your building in the middle of the night and graffitied something illegal all over it just because it uses a computer: you were also a victim.

As for "small web forums", that's still centralized, and still bad (and frankly is often worse, as the smaller players tend to have poorer data control policies)! I don't want anyone, anywhere, at any scale controlling centralized forums :/.

If you want to build an online gathering place, maybe it is in fact a very very good thing if it has to be built using decentralized end-to-end encryption with customizable endpoint filtering, and the "web forum" becomes a relic of the past.

It should be hard to build a centralized web service. There should be any number of scary liabilities that come with doing such, and that is frankly the only way we are ever going to get to a decentralized future, as, otherwise, yes: as it stands, we are essentially subsidizing the existence of centralized services.

And maybe we needed to do this in the 90s and 00s, but we now live in a world with a lot better understanding of encryption and a lot better understanding of peer-to-peer services and if we just stopped tolerating centralized services enough to force everyone to deal with the always-will-be-a-bit-worse experience of decentralized ones, we can escape this ad-infused dystopia (and remember: even the small players use ads, and their ads are again often worse).