If I had asked this question, it would be to gauge how far along the freedom spectrum this service has been designed to operate. There are distribution systems that are capable of even evading the most capable authorities, but their user experience is absolutely horrible.
Any system like this will strike a balance, maybe also designing provisions for removing "material that is really bad". Either out of an ethical obligation, or in order to not risk being shut down wholesale.
A system that was truly free and unlimited, would be the tool of an anarchist. Few people wish the implication of such a technology.
3-4 years ago, I was nearly a free speech maximalist. I hope we figure out a way to properly educate middle school and high school students about cognitive biases, logical fallacies, statistical fallacies, and other tools needed to properly deal with social media. Right now, society is just adjusting very poorly to the advent of social media.
At my school we're just given stale advice about cyberbullying and about posting things we'd regret.
People don't even question the legitimacy of things often or think critically about it. It's as if their critical thinking is numbed. I don't know how else to put it, but it's rather interesting.
It's really something straight out of singularity-related philosophy. A technology with massive benefits and dangers that's rolled out worldwide in only a couple of decades. If you look at social media as a whole, let's say it was in effect a single decade.
I'm sure we'll get a handle on social media eventually, with some damage along the way. But the underlying driver, fast technological change, won't disappear. This is not the last time we'll get into similar trouble.
"Don’t want the world to work like you want it to work. Love how it actually works and you will be happy."
Public facing portals and hosts serving unencrypted data are of course responsible for the content they serve.
People can upload content in two ways: either by using a public facing portal such as siasky.net or by spinning up their own portal client (Sia node) and communicating with hosts directly via the distributed network.
It is possible for individual portals and hosts to take down links and stop serving that content, for example after accepting copyright infringement requests.
It it also possible for anyone to spin up their own portal and keep content pinned as long as any host on the network will accept it. For example, skyportal.xyz is another public portal. Same goes for hosts.
The Skynet (Sia) model aims for thousands and thousands of hosts spread geographically. It becomes extremely difficult to delete any piece of data from the network entirely as long as someone wants to make sure it stays up.
Erasure coding redundancy ensures very high resilience from any single host going offline.
I think this needs to be solved at the protocol level. What if the portal is hosted in a DGAF jurisdiction, but I'm running my node in a different jurisdiction? What forces the portal to keep my interest in mind?
I was assuming that if I run a node serving content, I do not deal with curating that content at all. I just offer my bandwidth/storage for compensation, like a CDN.
I don't want to be involved in curation or moderation at all, I just don't want to be held liable in case I inadvertently serve something that is illegal in my jurisdiction.
You could also piece together content yourself by being your own portal. But running a node does not necessitate running a portal.
Edit: Above is about Sia. Apparently Skynet is different.
On a side note, child pornography is not the intended or primary use case for Skynet and is condemned by the dev team and the community at large. There is no evidence to suggest anyone is using Sia or Skynet for this type of content, and portal operators aggressively censor such content and report it to authorities.
Skynet is intended for privacy and data ownership while also offering users unprecedented features in terms of portability and composability.
The files uploaded via https://siasky.net/ are cleartext, but the files uploaded via https://skysend.hns.siasky.net/ are encrypted. There are also entire dropbox-like apps that are encrypted by default, for example https://marstorage.hns.siasky.net/
Most Skynet usage is app-driven, and therefore whether or not things are "encrypted by default" will depend on the apps that are used.
Or does it have nothing to do with anonymity/bullet-proof links and is merely just a very cheap storage?
P.S. Sorry if this sounds like noob questions but i wasn't able to answer it by looking at their homepage.