First of all, thank you for noting me and for making this excellent thread. I’d like to take a moment to reiterate my own view on the matter and explain how I personally see this issue.
We’re all familiar with centralized social media (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc). This model had nearly a decade of glory. Unfortunately it’s now reaching the point where it is no longer sustainable: With the rise of authoritarianism worldwide (including occidental countries) the new norm seems to be blaming web hosts and holding them liable for what users do on their platforms. With many governments already passing laws to make tech firms enforce censorship on their behalf, conventional social media is expected to eventually become as strict as television or radio shows.
Decentralized social media platforms are already providing a solution. The latest innovation here seems to be the ActivityPub standard, spearheaded by platforms such as Mastodon or Pleroma. Everyone can host their own server (their very own Twitter clone) and those servers communicate with each other independently. Currently the fediverse provides just the fix we needed, considering those sanctions and expectations only apply to tech companies and not ordinary people at home. But will even that last? How long until governments start demanding upload filters for copyright / hate speech / porn / whatever under threats of knocking at your door if your Mastodon or Peertube or GnuSocial instance isn’t modified to work by their demands?
That’s why to me, the holy grail is not just decentralized but also serverless platforms: A model in which no one has to host a server, and clients using the system handle all processing and hosting on their own. In this case a third party doesn’t even know who the owner of a platform is unless they mention… in fact platforms don’t even need to have owners as we could have profiles acting as independent sites communicating with one another directly. The only way to take any action then is to either criminalize the software (encryption and libraries like IPFS) or go after hundreds of people across the planet, without even knowing who’s the originator or just a viewer who accessed that page and got it cached on their drive, making law enforcement ridiculously hard without some crazy mass persecutions which I doubt even China would try at this scale.
This is where IPFS comes in: With the help of OrbitDB or similar databases, the serverless model can be achieved to a good extent! The secret is to rely on strong security keys so that any browser can read and modify a database if it has access but no one can touch it if they don’t… that is trickier but I’m sure we have brilliant developers already working on it. Of course there will be limitations: You can only do so many things under browser JavaScript so you won’t get all the features of having a server optimized to process stuff, like say compressing images and videos to lower quality before uploading to IPFS (maybe browsers can do that one now). Still I think it’s very worth it to consider building something like this.