Not a particularly new concept, Freenet has been around for over 20 years now. Tor and I2P have more traction in this segment.
And sure enough, I already found a website that says: “Please note that the Freenet network (much like Tor) attracts pedophiles and a large amount of sites contain child pornography. Some sites jokingly add a disclaimer saying This site does not contain child pornography. click here to continue.”
So the end result is that all one finds on it is child pornography, controversial opinions, leaks of government data, and the lot.
I suppose my ideal wish was a platform such as twitter that intermixes legal and illegal content.
I didn't realize it then, but if Hunter Bidens data had been put there they would have been basically impossible to censor and it might have swayed the election.
Like, this isn't a "think of the children" argument that those communities shouldn't be allowed to exist. Of course they should. But don't be surprised when people prefer more centralized and "censored" (policed/moderated) communities. For the vast majority of people, that is a feature, not a bug--and they tend to realize that and boomerang back to Twitter etc. when they try out decentralized/anticensorship-oriented alternatives.
A rather big difference is also the relatively lower level of activity on those alternatives.
I for one would love for there to be a decentralized system that by design makes it impossible to censor any content, and if the content would be stored in a decentralized, encrypted manner it would also be impossible to legally enforce it as it would not even easily be known where it would be stored at all.
Think of perhaps a network that retrieves its content viā an union-routing-esque mechanism where information is published that cannot feasibly be altered any more once put there whose origins and locations would be computationally infeasible to trace and as it's stored in an encrypted fashion the parts of the network that do store it do not even know what they are storing.