I've had an interest in distributed computing for a while now, but the user experience is always less streamlined than centralized services. I've never been able to sell peers on the "freedom" aspect or the "no central control" aspect. Because of this, more and more of our everyday lives are taking place over networks that are owned by advertising companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter) whose only real advantage is convenience.
This came to a head this month as the advertising companies decided they didn't want to be a conduit for certain kinds of discussion. This is a completely obvious outcome, and could have been anticipated years ago by anyone with a passing knowledge of software and the business models of these companies. The fact that the U.S. government relies on these companies to communicate with citizens is just wild.
Moderation is a very tough problem for any centralized platform because it's hard to moderate well at scale because moderation isn't a one-size-fits-all problem. Some kinds of speech is fine in certain contexts, but totally inappropriate in others. Centralized moderation is bad at accounting for this, and tends to create moderation policies that lack nuance.
Planetary is a piece of software I've never used! But I am on Secure Scuttlebutt (ID @iOOGrbvjXS1YAQWkL/eBy2UOAzUhQGRRG3p5IBFcnLQ=.ed25519
) and I love Planetary's mission: make Scuttlebutt more usable for non-technical users. I use a client called Patchwork and uses a Go version of Scuttlebutt called Go-SSB what client you use, you can interact with the network in very similar ways.
So what makes Secure Scuttlebutt different from pretty much everything else?
If this sort of thing is interesting to you, give it a look!