> There have been a million reasons for years to support decentralized communication platforms, but it only gets a burst of attention when a fascist / race-nationalist movement gets de-platformed? I find that more than a little depressing. It says not so flattering things about this community if this is what you folks care about enough to notice what's been obvious for so long.
This is a pretty reductionist way of looking at a post like this. These events have opened up a lot of interesting points:
- The practice of websites "soft deleting" content
- Reckless data collection
- The ease at which managed infrastructure can be revoked by vendors, without warning
- The potential for harm that bad actors can have on a centralized network
- The limits of curation / moderation
- The degrees of separation between companies that manage infrastructure, manage application code, and the people that manage communities and the power dynamics in between
- The roles of narratives, misinformation, and how it can be both monopolized, weaponized, and used to radicalize
Thinking about these things critically and iteratively does not make anyone a far-right apologist. Decentralization has been discussed on this website off and on for as long as I've been here. It's not always relevant, it's a problem with lots of caveats, and it will take rediscussion over time to find a solution that works well for everyone.
Still, I can't help thinking that it took opening this particular Pandora's Box to have this discussion. The last point in your response might not have been visible until the Capitol attack, but the rest was visible to anyone sufficiently pessimistic about the modern tech/social/legislative landscape.
Maybe you've missed the other decentralization discussions. I came here because of them, although I was (and still more am) concerned about decentralizing code hosting.
I am aware that this was a discussion on the peripheries like the small web/privacy advocate communities. What I'm surprised is that this wasn't discussed earlier in the technical _mainstream_, which is a distinctly different audience.
This is a pretty reductionist way of looking at a post like this. These events have opened up a lot of interesting points:
- The practice of websites "soft deleting" content
- Reckless data collection
- The ease at which managed infrastructure can be revoked by vendors, without warning
- The potential for harm that bad actors can have on a centralized network
- The limits of curation / moderation
- The degrees of separation between companies that manage infrastructure, manage application code, and the people that manage communities and the power dynamics in between
- The roles of narratives, misinformation, and how it can be both monopolized, weaponized, and used to radicalize
Thinking about these things critically and iteratively does not make anyone a far-right apologist. Decentralization has been discussed on this website off and on for as long as I've been here. It's not always relevant, it's a problem with lots of caveats, and it will take rediscussion over time to find a solution that works well for everyone.