Recently, I’ve been learning more about this subject. Today I came across the Decentralization Scoring System and it slapped me across the face.
If we’re talking takedown-resistance, we may need to enter the dark web realm:
- Tor hidden sites are inherently hard to pinpoint
- ZeroNet was an interesting project, seems to be abandoned
- I2P is like Tor on steroids, can publish all sorts of services
- IPFS is a decentralized P2P storage system (best/worst known for NFTs)
FreeNetHyphanet is a 25+ years old distributed content system with limited support for services- FreeNet is… honestly, haven’t seen a working example, but it sounds interesting?
- Matrix… if they manage to get things under control
- Nostr is a censorship-resistant distributed messaging system
Hosting distribution and localization varies, but they all have features to make it hard to pinpoint host and/or client locations.
Takedown resistance is a natural consequence of decentralization, but it’s not decentralization itself.
Technical means to evade takedown like you’re describing also tend to add complexity which reduces usability, whereas language support reduces complexity for speakers of the supported languages.
I think this scoring system is a little haphazard, and should probably be divided into multiple separate, parallel scores. Takedown resistance needs its own score, based on ability to integrate with anonymization tools, ownership of codebase, accessibility and security of dependencies, etc.
