What about NNTP? Isn't that a fully decentralized social network?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol

Note that the D language forums are on NNTP. For those that might dismiss NNTP as obsolete, may I present:

https://forum.dlang.org/

My point is that further decentralization doesn't yield anything useful with respect to content moderation, news servers are no exception.

That's like claiming that digital money can't be fully decentralized. And it indeed wasn't possible until Satoshi figured it out. There's no obvious reason to believe that a fully distributed social network isn't also possible. A requirement would be that any individual would have full agency for all operations on the network. Once you've got one agent that has special power over another agent, it's lost.

What Satoshi has actually proven is that the cliche is true: you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, if by "nothing" you mean "nothing that's a major crime."

Bitcoin is mostly a speculative tool and what few transactions happen on the blockchain are dominated by drugs and other contraband.

Society doesn't hold together at all unless people are smacked back into line when they act antisocially. No amount of technology can change that fundamental truth; ostracism and silence are core to human nature.

What does that have to do with anything I said? The point was that something previous claimed not possible was actually technically feasible. Completely unrelated to its morals, use cases, or value proposition. Do you now understand my point?

It's not technically feasible because feasibility requires it to satisfy the common use cases. Being irreversible makes many use cases infeasible.

I see your point - Bitcoin does exactly what it claims to do - but it is not a feasible replacement for money.

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it doesn't change anything with respect to operators removing content. A "website" is just what we call a node accessible via the http protocol.

A new protocol could conceivably prevent anyone from removing content without your consent, that's my point.

A protocol can't stop people from removing content from servers they control.

That's what they said about cryptocurrency before Satoshi came along. "You can't stop people from forging the coins in a ledger on their own servers".

And? What's your point? How does cryptocurrency prevent people from deleting content from servers they own?

My point was in my original comment. Let me rephrase it to help you understand. Before cryptocurrency, all ledgers were stored in a central database where the admin of that DB could modify or delete anyone's currency. I assume you understand how cryptocurrency works, but to reiterate, the DB is distributed, and if anyone deletes a particular transaction on their server, they will be out of sync with the rest, and their copy rejected as invalid.

Some sort of distributed validation mechanism could conceivably be created which avoids any single point of control for a piece of content. And in fact you could use the BTC blockchain as a proof of concept - post a message with your transaction that gets encoded in the blockchain. It now becomes impossible to delete or modify. It is essentially uncensorable. You could delete it from your copy of the blockchain, but the real blockchain is the consensus of all nodes, not your particular copy.