I'm very thankful to WebTorrent, DMT, Handshake and Electron for making things possible.
The only two kinds of successful content types that I’m aware of are pirated movies on Torrent and cryptocurrencies on the blockchain. They all depend on centralized discovery(torrent websites and exchanges).
Which makes me wonder, are these decentralized websites or social media platforms attacking the right problems?
It's an alternative transport, not application layer. If you can imagine doing anything with the world wide web , or ftp, you can imagine what this is for. It can transport hypertext files around, or whatever other file type you want.
In the web case, it'd just be some local http files you could open in a local file origin. There'd be no server. But that's still a way to exchange whatever art or media you could ever imagine.
We are bounded only by imagination. The internet is built around the Internet Protocol (IP), a way of streaming data arbitrarily from one computer to another. It has been up to us to imagine uses, to chase new possibilities. What do you think the use cases for IP are? Can you see what that made possible? Your question is in effect that, and trying to grasp at how broad, how possible, how potentiated this great work is is dauntingly hard, for we could share any type of content we want with either.
It shouldn't be possible for you to end up with nowhere to speak, that's why the public square exists, and I accept there is a need for an online public square that is currently pseudo-fufilled by private social media sites, but that doesn't mean deplatforming is bad.
Freedom of expression includes the freedom not to endorse or express an idea, and platforms shouldn't be forced to allow people to use them to amplify their speech, as then that right is violated, enforced expression is just as harmful as enforced silence.
"The problem isn't deplatforming -- it's the lack of places where deplatforming is prohibited."
This goes for a lot of things. It would be a problem if there was nowhere you could urinate, but that doesn't make rules against urinating in the street bad.
It is important that there are places you can't be censored, but that doesn't mean every place should be forced to be unfiltered firehoses. Curation has value. Should every newspaper be forced to platform anyone who sends them an article?
Enforced speech is just as harmful as prohibited speech. People should have the right to choose who they platform.
> It would be a problem if there was nowhere you could urinate, but that doesn't make rules against urinating in the street bad.
If you couldn't urinate anywhere legally, you wouldn't consider the laws against urination a problem?