Why can't it just be like message boards like Xenforo and PHPbb? There are numerous sports-related boards created 10+ years ago on that old tech that are still handling thousands of users concurrently.
They're also well moderated too; that's something that becomes impossible if you are trying to manage hundreds of thousands of users.
Gotta go back to those 2k-years where the phpBB-era was in it's high.
If that's true, then the internet itself was (and continues to be) a mistake.
One reason could be that decentralization reduces the liability on the company. They could save huge costs in letting users self-moderate and in not being responsible for illegal content.
^ This is the reason decentralized is better for everyone, including Meta. At a certain scale, content moderation goes from "hard" to "actually impossible."
With enough users, you will eventually have an Kurdish knitting group that meets in Turkey, who uses ethnic slurs ironically as a commentary on the government's treatment of immigrants, and you'll have to unravel the whole thing when someone complains. And the whole conversation is happening in Kurdish.
From a business perspective: absolution from liability. If it's decentralized then you can conveniently say you can't control it and you can't shut it down. All you can do is make money from it.
To me this is the angle: we want to be available in China, this is the way to be available in China.
"An authoritarian regime is better if they have a good dictator and the proper watchdogs"
It’s why freedom as in anarchy social media sites keep becoming far right nazi cesspools. Nobody who isn’t one of them wants to be around them.
I don’t have to worry all that much on here because when the insane green accounts come around replying to me with death threats they’re immediately deleted.
Absence of hierarchy and ruler is also the norm in Usenet, and the community as put processes for everyone to manage lunatics without the need of a central authority.
"Freedom", or rather control, allows a community to choose for themselves. I don't agree with everything here, for example, and I don't have the power to change things, but that's alright because I can live with that. On the other hand I have my own Fediverse instance which means I can choose what I see and what I don't see. I still believe it's important.
If they go so far as to be partition tolerant then you get a lot of resiliency wins. i.e. if a solar flare knocks out anything attached to a long enough cable to induce circuit-damaging current, you can still gossip messages between colocated devices, some of which might be en route to someplace distant. Secure Scuttlebutt Protocol works in this mode for example.
In such a scenario, being able to piggyback messages on travellers you don't know (even if it takes a few days to propagate) could be lifesaving.
There's also something to be said re: censorship. If you can facilitate comms between otherwise firewalled groups of people by simply sneaking a SD card across the border from time to time, that's right in line with Meta's mission statement.
I doubt that Meta is going to make it this decentralized. Whatever they build is going to be decentralized™. But it would be pretty cool to see this design space explored.