Hey fellow libertarians!
I have wanted to share my thoughts on this topic for some time now, but unfortunately I have only just got around to it.
For context: Lemmy.world started as an open, general purpose platform. When I migrated from Reddit at the beginning of june, I opened my account on this instance, as the said values correlate strongly with my freedom-oriented values. I was convinced of the idea of a generalist and uncensored platform that is open to any school of thought and can serve as a frontpage for the broad internet user.
At that time lemmy.world was a fresh instance with few users. Today it is the biggest lemmy server and one of the biggest insances of the whole fediverse. With this rapid growth come new problems and responsibilities that need to be managed in a short period of time.
Recently, lemmy.world, on which this community is hosted, has distanced itself from piracy communities and has increasingly adopted a more restrictive and cautious policy. Even though they still belong to one of the most open instances, the demand for a radical step in the direction of an absolutely free, community-owned and authority-free instance has been sparked in me.
An instance that is based entirely on user-based moderation and basically allows any content given that no one has been directly harmed through it (see NAP). One where the moderators are provided by the communities and have the sole right to intervene where the NAP has been violated. The protection, maintenance, upgrading and other management of the instance would be completely decentralised and left to the community.
However, such a server hosting the instance would be illegal in most countries and no matter in which country it is hosted, it would still be a single point of failure that could be shut down at once. The only way to avoid this bottleneck would be not to set up a central administration at all. If no one, or rather everyone, owns this instance at the same time and everyone is only responsible for what they write themselves, there would also be no single responsible entity where legal complaints could be addressed to.
From a technical perspective the content would have to be stored on a decentralised storage, the computing power would have to be distributed and the domain would have to be hosted independently of any governmental control. Regarding self-regulation, users should have an easy way to block unwanted content with little effort. This could be done with presets and publicly shared filter lists.
At the moment, this is nothing more than a pious hope, or rather a general vision. But I think it can be a goal worth working towards. On the way, this vision will probably change fundamentally, but the goal is to enable free communication without compromise.
Please feel free to write what you think and make suggestions for improvement. But please remain constructive! Thanks for reading!