My problem with Aether is its emphemerality. I respect the devs and community for wanting it but part of the appeal of forums/usenet/reddit is being able to search through old posts.
At the time the restriction was on who was allowed to operate and for what purpose.
These types of restrictions in the real world are common. We don't permit say, people to set up shop running gambling tables inside of library reading rooms.
We have restrictions all around us like this. No picnicking on freeways, or say, hookers picking up Johns next to the paintings in the city art gallery. You can't just say, wheel in dirt to city hall and start tending a garden in the council chamber.
We decided to blow away all such equivalent restrictions on the web in the early 90s, being antithetical to any conventions. Maybe continuing to adhere to that, 30 years in, is not the best idea. Obvious guardrails, equivalent to no picnicking on the freeway, can be set up.
It's time to build more of a rules based online society
You make it socially unacceptable to run a server that emits spam. You make it socially unacceptable to work for a company that emits spam.
At an interview: "OK, I see you worked for an oil company, right, and then a porn company, fine -- oh, you worked for a spammer. Sorry, we're done. I don't know how this happened, I'll need to talk to HR about their filters."
socially where? where ever you set those social norms, someone will set up a server not there. like russia or any of the other internet bogeymen countries
IMO, GNS would benefit from a blockchain to store the root zone. Currently, It is managed by a non-profit. You can add your own TLD but good luck enabling everyone to resolve it without GNUnet e.V's say-so.
The problem is making a blockchain that's private enough.
I would say GNS proposes an interesting tradeoff, at least one that's not been attempted/proposed by other projects. They intend their root zone to be transferred to ICANN for ownership and for the protocol to be backwards-compatible with DNS, so that moving to GNS wouldn't require major updates from all providers/vendors (unlike IPv6).
Also, the hyper hyper local root and public-key delegation balance the powers of the centralized root. Hypothetically, adding a new "TLD" (for your client) would be very easy so we would probably see more old-style "indexes" sharing zones you could subscribe to, also in a peer-to-peer manner so that if i add my friend anita's zone to my root, i could then recursively resolve through her published index (in her zone), like blog.anita or barbara.anita (a hypothetical friend of anita's).
It's also worth mentioning that this would significantly change the Certificate Authority problem by having a secure network to distribute the keys via DANE entries. It would still be a problem though that anita could suddenly point barbara in her zone to her own machine and serve her own content/certificate. But i guess that's what Web of Trust (or rather Fog of Trust with zero-knowledge proofs) is for? :)
I would go further. I would say that people should be allowed to make up their own mind without unjust interference (i.e. censorship (such as shadow-banning) and artificial manipulation of visibility (such as putting 'fact-checks' in prominent positions)) regardless of whether someone in a position of authority (whether elected into government, bought into the board of directors or shareholders of some company, or just has mod privileges for whatever reason) thinks it's true or not. The people decide for themselves what's true, not the powerful.
I would go even further and say that people should be able (in practical life) to choose their own moderators to filter and curate content. And know that they work for them, not for some third party.
In today's media visibility is massively skewed by the platform's interest of "engagement" — which too often means enragement. That’s how fake news spread so fast (also in ad-click-financed newspapers, by the way).
They aren’t only exploiting human psyche, but also the proprietary, centrally controlled algorithms that drive social networks and the ad-financing of newsrooms.
If you log out of Youtube and then watch a talk about Java development, and then the Youtube algorithm suggests alt-right content in the auto-play-list, then something is wrong with the algorithm.
It is ironic that platforms that send the fake news your way in the first place then put a fact check underneath.
Tether is on record as censoring transactions (remember the Poly Network fiasco?). They are clearly centrally controlled despite being a token on the Ethereum network.
Whether they should have censored transactions in that instance is irrelevant. The fact remains that the coin does not belong to it's holders.
https://join-lemmy.org/
https://sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide/
https://getaether.net/
I think Freenet/Locutus contracts that work like forums on Aether (with auditable moderation and elections) would be neat.