Whenever a new decentralized-social-media project pops up, one counterargument I keep seeing (e.g. here) is that people are going to clamor for the removal of illegal/sleazy content.

As far as I can tell, the pro-decentralization argument is something like:

  • Like it or not, the technology exists; people can upload whatever they want to the Internet, and in particular we now have decentralized, permissionless data storages where the people providing the storage space don’t even know what content is being stored. Even if we wanted to somehow prevent that content from being uploaded, we couldn’t.
  • There are huge dangers in allowing companies like Twitter and Facebook to become our society’s moderators.
  • We can still build walled gardens, with moderators to forbid content that’s against the rules. But we want lots of those (not a single company moderating the entire platform), and they have to be built on top of the censorship-resistant foundation. We can’t prevent people from posting whatever illegal/sleazy stuff they want, but we can create a user-interface layer on top that (by default) hides it.

Still, I can imagine this being a significant hurdle to adoption, especially in the early stages, both from a legal standpoint and from a public-opinion standpoint. I don’t really have any great ideas about what to do about that. Any thoughts?

(Crossposted on /r/Web3SocialMedia; feel free to comment there.)