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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

As a free speech absolutist, I hope that what comes out of this is a completely anonymized, uncensorable alternative. We've gotten the arbitrary censorship walled garden social media sites mostly because until now there hasn't been any particular reason for most users to step outside of them.

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I think many have tried but face an uphill battle of unless a significant majority is willing to relocate, the prevailing content will be things that are deemed undesirable/bannable on other platforms, which distracts potential users.

Having a completely decentralized solution also comes with the issue of future governance. If a single entity controls the direction (even if the spec is open and you can host it yourself), then it's not decentralized. If you end up with a consortium then you'll face the same issue of email, innovation is hard to spread as you need multiple actors with competing interests to agree.

If your vision is having multiple entities providing different experiences tailored to individual taste, they might start consolidating and effectively forming several disjoint platforms.

p.s.

The web can be said to be decentralized but it's dominated by large players all the way from hosting to browsers. If all three major browsers don't agree on your proposal, it's effectively dead. Who's to say entrenched players won't arise in your vision of a decentralized social media?

You mean PeerTube? Perhaps it could also be combined ith I2P.

Exactly - there are technical solutions, they just rely on mass uptake in order to work.

Nah, centralized apps have won because mass appeal and market momentum hinges on factors almost entirely other than an app's technical architecture.

I disagree. People just need to build a good social networking protocol.

Email for example can be thought of as a social networking app but it's really decentralised.

While you can ban Gmail, it's really hard to ban Email.

Something like AT Protocol would be what it would like like or activity pub.

But so far, they are all so bad.

I don't think that's at odds with what I said. If there's a good decentralized protocol that gets momentum, good for it. But, the interests that build social media apps well in terms of what is successful in the marketplace, usually chose not to do that because it isn't in their interest to do so. They spend a lot of money on marketing, driving engagement, etc, and most don't want to share it.

Email is a bit of an outlier because it gained critical mass before the web was predominantly commercialized.

> completely anonymized, uncensorable alternative.

So a fountain of child sexual assault material?

just think a tiny bit about why that would be a bad idea

We have that. Welcome to the World Wide Web.

We all walked into the walled gardens and went "ooh, looks mighty nice in here!"

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