>The solution is simple. Exchange the client/server model for a peer-to-peer model. By peer-to-peer and I mean literally IP to IP and not something like instant messenger that bounces messages through a central server. Only then can you assure a fix to interference.

This is my go to response as to "what to do about social media."

And I opine|rant|blather on about it whenever I see folks complaining about or claiming that some rules|regulation|policy will "fix" social media.

And such tracts are becoming more and more common (cf. this article[0][1], entitled OK, but What Should We Actually Do About Facebook? I Asked the Experts. from today). But, as in the article linked, no one ever suggests decentralized communications.

I'm not sure why, but there certainly are barriers to making decentralized "social media" work. Those same barriers are what make centralization of much of our digital universe necessary and hugely profitable.

Those barriers are primarily (there are other issues, but are mostly part of the result rather than the cause) related to the ways in which end-users are provided access to the Internet.

I'm specifically referring to asymmetric internet links. Most internet links are $X Mb/sec download and ($X / 25 or so) Mb/sec upload.

What's more, there are often policy restrictions on "consumer" internet links that block them from "running servers," whether that be port blocking or throttling.

This keeps decentralized communication from being viable. Other than these artificial barriers, there's nothing stopping folks from hosting their own cat/family/meme photos/videos and/or other content.

There are plenty of decentralized platforms that can do so with minimal set up and configuration.

However, if you can't serve more than a couple of concurrent connections at a reasonable speed, that breaks the whole decentralized/P2P paradigm. Because my upload bandwidth is the limiting factor in being able to host content.

If, on the other hand, you have a link with symmetric bandwidth without policy restrictions, serving your own content is a no-brainer.

As such, my "solution" for addressing the "censorship" of the centralized "social media" platforms is to make them irrelevant by eliminating the entire reason for their existence -- asymmetric bandwidth favoring download vs. upload on internet links.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/facebook-experts....

[1] (same as [0], just from archive.md): https://archive.md/qpNtV

Edit: Added title of linked article in the comment.