You didn't suggest anything, you just posted a vague slogan, interpretable in many ways. You "correction" here contains even fewer details. If you want what you're saying to be clearly understood then try putting in more than the bare minimum of effort.
Maybe not what you were wanting to suggest but... yes it is something that would be the case in the situation you suggested, for better or worse, regardless of your intent.
I love Linux, but it would not exist without corporate sponsors. It's a wonderful project and it continues to stay relatively pure due to the GPL, but there's really no possibility a social media platform (or the internet at-large) could adopt a similar strategy. Hosting is expensive, speech is fickle, and people's willingness to adopt fringe alternatives is at an all-time low. And without it's Benevolent Dictator For Life, there's frankly no guarantee that Linux wouldn't become a corporate-driven project. Blind authoritarianism is ironically one of it's strongest defenses.
The decentralized internet, the blockchain, the darkweb and I2P all need someone to pay for hosting costs. If you don't get a corporation in your pocket early and fast, then you won't be able to scale your website reliably. It's a common constraint across most networked platforms.
> I love Linux, but it would not exist without corporate sponsors.
Of course it would, for it already did. It might not be as polished, and there would be more issues with hardware, but it would certainly still exist, and even thrive. Because enough people want it and can put in the manpower to create it.
> but there's really no possibility a social media platform (or the internet at-large) could adopt a similar strategy.
By decentralizing it could.
> Hosting is expensive
Decentralizing would work around that.
> Blind authoritarianism is ironically one of it's strongest defenses.
The strongest defense is GPL, because if a company tried to do that then the same thing that happened with nginx would happen.
> The decentralized internet, the blockchain, the darkweb and I2P all need someone to pay for hosting costs.
With a properly designed protocol these costs would be neglibile.
The Decentralized Internet already exists: Mastodon, Tor, IPFS, (gasp) self-hosting, etc, etc, etc, provide the data delivery side and very few things are stopping you from hosting your own splinter DNS servers (or using one of the more-widely-used alternative nameservers) for the name resolution side.
Thing is, despite the fact that that all that (or functionally identical implementations of the same idea) has been around for decades, very, very few people use them.
Honestly, I think it was clear. What's your next best guess after the other users'?
> The Decentralized Internet already exists
In a very alpha stage version, sure. It's currently fragmented, unstable, slow, has limited services and can still be interfered with.
I want something significantly closer to the 'normal' internet, but with a greater capacity for redundancy, privacy and anonymity. This is absolutely possible, inevitable even, but also quite a long ways away.
It has been like this for twenty-five years. I know this because I've been playing around with these tools for that long.
That these tools just haven't got much better over the last *quarter century* suggests that either really solving the problem is effectively impossible, or that solving it isn't actually worth the effort, given that someone with a $2 pipe wrench can nearly always extract security-relevant encryption material from a knowledgeable insider.
> I want something significantly closer to the 'normal' internet, but with a greater capacity for redundancy, privacy and anonymity.
You need to learn how the Internet works. It is (and always has been) a federated, distributed system, even back when it was known as the ARPANET. These days, usually-larger-than-end-user (but not always) participants in the Internet run one or more Autonomous Systems, and negotiate connection agreements (often called "Peering" or "Transit" agreements) to interconnect their Autonomous Systems with others.
You want privacy? Get service from operators that only interconnect with other operators that refuse to use their god-like powers of observation to deanonymize your traffic.
I think the opposite is inevitable: even if you create another incarnation of Tor with better speed and so on, you can bet sooner or later the government will find ways to infiltrate it, just like they did with the current version.
I agree that would be fantastic, but I would like something with protection against interference baked into the design, rather than having to rely on goodwill.