An issue they would run into in the future.
If YouTube was based on BitTorrent.
If Facebook was based on Diaspora, Mastodon, Scuttlebutt, etc.
If Messenger was based on Matrix.
Centralized platforms make ad revenue, form moats, and become big business. Hosting isn't their core competency, so they outsource. Thus AWS.
The web _was_ P2P at the start, but it became centralized because that was more efficient and increased both value and communication. The original social networks (BBS and chat channels, Usenet, etc) _were_ distributed, but it turns out that this made them easy prey for parasitic and toxic actors and all of the available tools to prevent this imposed asymmetric costs on the recipients and did not scale at all.
Distributed systems are easy, but making distributed communication systems not suck is incredibly hard. The Internet is a distributed system that was a lot better before all of you showed up and cast us into the hell of eternal September.
Doesn’t seem to be true in the case of Twitter
https://nypost.com/2021/01/21/twitter-sued-for-allegedly-ref...
So yes -- this is probably how it will go, it's already started.
I'm not interested in slaking your thirst for conservative blood to win fake internet points.
I wonder how that can be avoided.
I dislike the people that support facist, racist beliefs, but I 100% will defend their right to say such things. In my opinion, once you start talking about restricting speech, you get into the grey area - who decides what speech to restrict? Off the top of my head, the most "capable" organizations would be either:
- The companies who run these glorified advertising platforms (which would regulate speech based on "how much money will we lose?"), or
- a Governmental body (which by its nature has a monopoly on violence - "if you say something we don't like, your social credit score goes down and you can't leave the country or we throw you in jail"). I think freedom of speech is a very large part of what makes America distinctive from other countries.
- Alternatively, we could have whoever the loudest complainers are control speech, which would be very reactionary - driven by misinformation or coordinated culture change campaigns(?)
If the people with abhorrent opinions decide to start causing direct physical harm to people in reality - that's when police, government, etc. should step in and penalize them - not social media companies or governments, or the vocal minority determining what people should and shouldn't say.
Here's I think the real issue, we make discussion platforms... people don't want to discuss. They just want to put up and push posters of what they believe.
And we're surprised when things go wrong.
The other day, we talked with family members and all I heard was slogans (the 'energy independent','damn socialists' type ). And it is hard to talk about it, because you have to start by dispelling the slogans and that alone is an hour of deprogramming ( assuming you have receptive audience ). I gave up on that challenge.
And I feel like I failed there, because we DO need to discuss things. We will most assuredly not agree, but need to stop taking our news from one source. Diverse diet is probably the only way to go.
Even if allowing fascists and racists to express their speech actively harms or silences you in turn?
Relevant: https://twitter.com/nathanwpyle/status/1031008855210123264/p...
Lat's say they're successful and they can impose their own policies that do not include free speech.
I'm pretty short on free speech now...
It's hard to ignore that.
The idea that parler or gab is somehow "freer" or less censored than any other site seems untrue. They are more tolerant of a certain political identity and less tolerant of another one.
It's just replacing their boogiemen with one of their own design.
Isn't the whole problem for Parler that no major providers will host their servers? How would federation help? You need a full P2P layer, fully decentralized, routed over Tor to prevent blocking by ISPs.
Parler's goal is whatever the billionaire Mercer family want it to be; presumably "Twitter for Brietbart readers", since that's another of their media properties.
If they cared about free speech, they wouldn't have aligned with any specific ideology.
Look past the religious aspect and you'll see the content on there is much less toxic than on Twitter.
Edit: Downvoted for facts.
I'd argue the completely other way: people have traded convenience for freedom. The convenience of using the Internet for has massively eroded freedom of speech.
It's been immensely convenient for tens of thousands of people to be able to say any kind of harmful trash on the Internet without suffering any negative consequences and that's what they have been doing for years now, and so now we all pay the price.
The term "freedom of speech" has been appropriated by alt-right and modern Nazi movements and is now associated almost strictly with, which means that it is now feasible to call this freedom a real and actual risk to human life and take real steps towards curbing that freedom in general, even for people who are not abusing it to actively work towards harming other people.
When actual discussions and conversations cannot take place under the guise of pretend harm, real violence happens.
I do wholeheartedly believe the attack on the capitol is just the result of a disenfranchised part of the population who've been shit on and deplatformed for the last 4 years by the establishment (including Orange Man, FWIW).
If anything, the problem is that they weren't deplatformed early enough.
There is no shortage of women with PTSD from such relationships who've spent the past four years continuously triggered because Trump acted just like an abusive boyfriend or husband, and it was difficult to avoid him on the news or on social media.
The same companies and that they are trying to remove influence from (Silicon Valley - amazon, twitter, facebook, etc.) are the same companies that they're doing business with.
Gab is ridiculous and I get a very religious "holier than thou" (lol) vibe from them. Their founder(s) are very puritanical and will likely not survive the next few years.
The true future of free speech is through federated platforms/services similar to how email servers were back 20-25 years ago. People have traded freedom for convenience over the past couple of decades and it shows.