You might be right on this. In my mind one of the key properties of decentralized systems/networks is censorship-resistance, which (again in my mind) means that everyone always has access to the full set of data and not a cut-down version that the "property owner" decided to arbitrarily allow.
Decentralized systems do still have benefits even when they can be moderated. I wonder if there are many projects that actually allow that?
>Decentralized systems do still have benefits even when they can be moderated. I wonder if there are many projects that actually allow that?
Most of them, at least the successful ones. It's a bit worrying to me that we seem to start talking about decentralized services as a theoretical concept instead of a reality of the internet.
Email is decentralized but every server typically has a bunch of rules to prevent abuse. Videogame servers used to be decentralized but still obviously attempted to limit cheating and allowed each admin to kick users and implement arbitrary restrictions and improvements. IRC allows mods in individual channels and ircops that can kline network-wide. The web itself is (?) decentralized but every server can arbitrarily decide what to host and not to host.
It's a bit odd to me that some people in this thread seem to assume that lack of moderation is an inescapable side-effect of a decentralized system, this is obviously not the case. You can't censor the network as a whole but you still have free reign on your server.
You're free to implement the rules you want on your node, the only risk is that you may end up being incompatible and fork from the rest of the network. That being said if the rules end up being useful and beneficial for the majority most people will use that version and the issue will be moot (e.g. people don't usually fork IRC servers to remove modding tools).
email and irc are both federated services and users depend on their server software or server admin to make sure weird content does reach them. In an actually decentralised system you must expect the client or protocol to deal with this.
IRC is admittedly not the best example since you can't usually join an IRC network "swarm" without approval.
I think email works though, anybody can spawn a postfix server and interact with the rest of the mesh immediately. I run my own email server that I fully control and I never had to ask anybody permission to do it.
I think it would make sense for Radicle to work somewhat similarly, anybody can spawn a repo, there's no central authority that can censor or alter any repo but the owner still has full control over it.
Moderation powers scare me, but I do know that notabug.io , d.tube , and the upcoming HackerNoon 2.0 have this type of feature. Except it is called "curation" (technically, content can't really get deleted, but a curated homepage can certainly exclude content).
The good news is that the founders of all these apps are working towards user-configurable curation, so you could override who/what/how curation happens. I don't like moderation, but opting into a web-of-trust is, I think, an interesting area to explore.
No matter the good I want to come from decentralization, it certainly can be used for bad. However, its abuse should be less than centralized system, so hopefully that means real progress is happening.
Decentralized systems do still have benefits even when they can be moderated. I wonder if there are many projects that actually allow that?