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What's interested about Gab is that it wasn't content hosting on another platform (Facebook/Twitter). It was their own platform, that people wrote and built. W

What's interested about Gab is that it wasn't content hosting on another platform (Facebook/Twitter). It was their own platform, that people wrote and built. What if you run a Plemore/Mastodon server that has users with controversial content? Is it okay for Vultr or DigitalOcean or Amazon to just yank your account? Sure you can claim capitalism and find another provider, but we've seen here that finding another provider is hard and migration is expensive! I wrote about this almost a year ago when it happened to The Daily Stormer and I still think it's more relevant today: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-censorship/ https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-... Shutting down platforms just drives people to more extreme platforms. You can't just yell "decentralization" because then you could have providers pulling individual instances of federated ActivityPub/OStatus based software. At some point we're going to need to address free speech online, because it's not like the real world. You can't just go to another news stand or buy your own printer. There are a limited of people that can host general purpose VMs at a reasonable price with a decent provisioning API. The domain issue is the most troubling. I don't see any reason a registrar should be allowed to pull domain services from people. Right now it's just content some people don't like, but what if a business starts pulling domain registrar service for business they just don't like, and claim it has to do with hate?

wuliwong 8y ago
I agree that there is a difference between deplatforming gab and someone like Alex Jones. I don't think that any solution is going to be a permanent one, whether it is a law or a technology. I tend to look towards technological advancement to first outpace laws and then the govts slowly catch up. I do think that decentralized storage solutions behind decentralized applications are pretty interesting. There is even something called IPFS which is being pitched as a possible challenger to HTTP. In some of the distributed solutions, the computers holding the data only ever see it encrypted, so the possibility of censorship on that end is mitigated at least for a while. I'm not expert on the topic but I've recently found it very exciting and has given me a glimmer of hope.

wuliwong 8y ago

I agree that there is a difference between deplatforming gab and someone like Alex Jones. I don't think that any solution is going to be a permanent one, whether it is a law or a technology. I tend to look towards technological advancement to first outpace laws and then the govts slowly catch up. I do think that decentralized storage solutions behind decentralized applications are pretty interesting. There is even something called IPFS which is being pitched as a possible challenger to HTTP. In some of the distributed solutions, the computers holding the data only ever see it encrypted, so the possibility of censorship on that end is mitigated at least for a while. I'm not expert on the topic but I've recently found it very exciting and has given me a glimmer of hope.