Welcome to NoFILTER, the unstoppable, uncensorable, undeplatformable freedom of speech app. By design, this app allows you to spread your word without limits. This app and your articles reside on the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized mesh network consisting of thousands of user nodes. There is no web server, no database, and no cloud; therefore, making this app and your content unstoppable and undeplatformable.
When your article gets published to IPFS, the hash of the contents of the article becomes the name of the file. If one character gets added or removed the hash name changes; therefore, making it impossible to censor.
If a government were to try to block the nofilter.org domain, you can still access the site and the content via hundreds of IPFS gateways around the world as well as through #IPFS directly by downloading the ipfs companion browser extension or by using the Brave browser which natively supports the IPFS protocol.
That's the beauty of it, it doesn't. You can spam nonsense all day long. This is only a problem if you want people to actually read what you are posting.
I would challenge the downvoters of this comment to contribute an informed rebuttal.
IPFS is just content-addressing+p2p. In the conventional sense it is similar in comparison to the greater internet. Joe Blow can be on his blog talking about blenders and mixing spoons all day and none of us have to know he exists until we follow the address to his content, thereby downloading it.
Where IPFS takes this a step further is enrolling the viewer/reader/participant in the swarm of peers replicating this content.
The point is that hosting content uses resources, and resources are limited. Therefore, if nothing prevents it, an attacker could theoretically use up all the resources available, which would bring this supposedly unstoppable publishing platform to a stop. Yet, if they prevented it, it would be a kind of censorship, so the platform could not claim to be uncensorable.
Despite all the talk IPFS is just voluntary content mirroring. If people feel you're spamming, they'll stop mirroring your shit. Which of course illustrates the worthlessness of the platform for "Anti-censorship" and "Free Speech."
I stopped believing in "decentralized free speech" platforms the moment they all decided to censor and attack anyone they politically disagreed with (ie Gab's treatment at the hands of Mastodon). None of the people running these projects actually understand what freedom of speech really is (the ability of THE PEOPLE YOU HATE to speak, a principle, not just a law). When these people drone on and one about "Free Speech" and "Anti-censorship," they really just mean "for people who agree with me," which is no free speech at all.
Beyond that, IPFS is a joke. It's hovered in toy status for years, devoid of the core features it needs to justify its existence (a way to motivate people to host besides the goodness of their hearts, a DNS replacement that's not laughable, a simple and stable interface etc). But even if IPFS was everything it claims to be, using it for something like this is laughable:
1. There is no security in IPFS. It's a content mirroring technology. If you're hosting something illegal, the authorities can find you just fine.
2. IPFS is entirely voluntary. Mirrors can opt out of mirroring things they don't want to host. What are people going to opt out of most? Controversial content. Oh yeah, you can host "controversial" content of the type a teenager things is controversial. But anything actually hot is going to get shit-canned before you can blink.
Overall, IPFS, and anything built on it, is either absurd over-engineering or absurd under-engineering. If you wanna mirror bland, non-hot stuff, just mirror it in the usual ways. You don't need all this cyber-punk larping cloak-and-dagger shit. Nobody cares. And if they DO care? IPFS ain't gonna save you.
"Free speech" of the type often invoked these days is essentially, "the right to be hateful, attack other groups and lobby for their subjugation". Then, of course, there's the "right to poison society by spreading radicalizing disinformation".
Adherents to this style of free speech decry their de-platforming by "big tech" which doesn't want to endorse their toxicity (partly because dysfunctional societies are bad for business and partly because their targeted customers may speak with their wallets).
The acolytes' standard reaction in response to this violation of their right to be awful is "who gets to choose which speech is acceptable?" as if we don't otherwise have a functioning society, social contract, and laws.
Other people get to choose. That's who. Their right to free speech includes a non-obligation to regurgitate your speech. Don't want to be "censored"? Then, don't pretend you have no idea what anti-social behavior is and don't be awful to other people.
Otherwise expect that you're free to talk, but no one's obligated to listen.
For those who don't agree with this, then tell you what: pick something absolutely and near universally abhorrent, say sexual abuse of children, and make the right to lobby for its legitimacy your rallying cry. Use it as the example of speech you intend to allow because "who should be the arbiter?"
Until you're willing to stake your beliefs (or project, etc.) on that, no one should buy what you're selling. Because then it becomes immediately obvious that what you're really lobbying for is a narrow, but vocal group of people whose ideas you likely agree with, but whose speech you view as recently restricted.
I smiled at their George Washington quote; people who know George Washington's stance on free speech (e.g. his support for the Sedition Act) understand that he drew the line of free speech much more harsh than what we do today.
Iron manning your own argument or appealing to authority are fallacious ways to make an argument. Boiled down, quotes usually are just propaganda.
It's funny because if you're going to indulge in fallacy to get your point across, at least appeal to the right authority. Only problem with that is it's pretty hard to find an authority that doesn't believe in some form of the harm principle. The closest I can think of is John Stuart Mill, who said, quote:
"Society can and does execute its own mandates ... it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough..."
Which is along the lines of the views pitched here... and Mill _invented_ the harm principle!
I do smile a lot. The alternative is a sinking feeling when I read sites like the one linked here that I personally feel like wouldn't exist if the creators embraced a little more empathy and understanding of natural rights.
Is the printing press compatible with this "harm principle"? With "natural rights"? Is the internet? Is wordpress? Would you deny the basic empathy of the people who created these things?
I’m not sure what your argument is. The technology you listed and nofilter are similar in that they are just tools. The creators are well within their rights to create anything they want.
Your ideology is flawed. Human beings are not divided into two camps, "Good" and "Bad." You do not slice the pie in two and and discard everyone in the "Bad" camp. If you do, and do so honestly, you will find in short order that you have discarded everyone who ever lived, or ever will.
Humans are complicated creatures with many flaws and nobilities. Because of Washington's actions in both the revolution and his presidency, a vast number of people enjoyed far more freedom than they would have otherwise. Also because of Washington's actions, some people had to endure a life a brutal slavery. Neither of these aspects is untrue, or erases the other from history by its existence. History, and humans, are often messy and uncomfortable. Stop trying to pretend otherwise. It is possible for Washington to be both a hero of freedom and a disappointing oppressor at the same time. This is the paradox of the human condition.
You're not enlightened. You haven't discovered some grand, hidden truth that all the world must know by pointing out that respected historical figures were flawed. We know. We've always known. We respect them anyway, because they did good as well as bad, and the good was a big deal.
You did a much better job than I did explaining why Washington is a risky person to associate with when trying to convey the idea of freedom. His legacy in that regard is too messy.
And you're absolutely right - I am not enlightened.
apparently washington was also generally a bad military strategist and tactician, racked by uncertainty and indecisiveness. he happened to get lucky in a couple crucial battles, otherwise we may have had no idea who he was. so luck strikes again, and washington the symbol is more relevant than washington the man.
The one thing that sticks out to me as a 'flaw' in this app is how it is marketed. It might be better to market it under a 'normal' name as a great blogging app, which, by the way, is uncensorable, etc.
That might make it seem like a good alternative for the general public rather than just a safe haven for marginalized voices.
The first amendment protects you from being arrested by the government for what you say. It does not protect you from everyone else saying you're a fucking idiot and shunning you when you say something stupid....
Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect. - Eleanor Roosevelt
That's a great question. Free speech doesn't mean lawlessness. There are many exceptions listed in the US constitution and those can be pursued by authorities to the degree they navigate IPFS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
For starters, we deliberately made a conscience decision not to make it easy to include photos or videos in content. We also made a decision not to create a general feed where all content is accessible.
> For starters, we deliberately made a conscience decision not to make it easy to include photos or videos in content.
So instead of censoring some photos and videos through moderation, you decided to censor all photos and videos.
It sounds like you want to comply with US law, but US law requires censorship of some speech: libelous claims, copyrighted works, incitement to violence, etc. Why comply with some US law and not all of it?
No, which is kinda the point. Every platform makes decisions about what content is acceptable, this one has decided your hate speech is perfectly fine, but a photo of your dog is beyond the pale.
Twitter, Facebook etc. all make their own decisions about what is acceptable for you to post on their platform, and so does this "free speech" platform.
People get emotional and re-share pictures and videos more than text.
A photoshop of a politician doing something they never did or a deepfake of them saying something they never said is a lot more infectious than a mere written claim of the same thing.
It's only cencorship if they prevented that and NOT also your clearly virtuous and harmless pet video.
If the entire MO of this is to be “uncensorable,” and “undeplatformable”, I don’t think there will be too many ordinary dog photos. Clearly this will be a place for fringe elements who otherwise are getting kicked off bigger platforms, and somehow don’t want to use the existing alt platforms.
I'm curious what type of content you believe requires/prefers claimed uncensorable mediums of being published. Do you envision it being movie reviews and cake recipes, or can you imagine that ideologies prone to being censored may make up the lion's share of that content?
Xinjiang human rights abuses? US drone attacks on civilians, journalists and other innocent bystanders? Deplatformed LGBTQ+ content?
However, these mediums are more frequently used to promote conspiracy theories, like the ones anti vaxxers spread and only lead to more covid victims, brainwashing leading to Q-anon types that have recently stormed the US Capitol, IS recruitment PR, CP etc. Oh and the video starts with the deplatforming of President Trump, a former head of state with a trolling habit, as if this was a net loss for the rest of us? Promoting your app with this type of content, plus the name and the subtitle in almost all caps is quite telling.
People who agree with the mainstream, official line, government etc. don't need anti-censorship platforms. Your response to opening such a platform and seeing positions you hate should be "Excellent! It's working as it should!"
I'd say "works as it should" if there was evidence of actual human rights violations. They keep happening everywhere. Not conspirations without any trace of substance and airing grievances of privileged classes.
It's NOT that I disagree. Every now and then I do consider something nonmainstream credible enough to research deeper. Guess how such research ends up. Poorly.
Every single time someone tries something like this, it becomes a bastion for hate speech and everyone else is driven away. It turns out most people actually like a moderated forum. If you joined a book club and every meeting had people just screaming the N-word at the top of their lungs the entire time, I suspect you wouldn't stay at that book club long. Yet time and time again we see people learning this same lesson. It makes me wonder whether everyone who is extremely anti-censorship really does just want to scream the N-word in everyone's face all day, deep down.
The clearnet is still a bit of a wild west (albeit now a heavily commercialized one). There's all sort of stuff that shouldn't be there, and if you go to report it to get it taken down, it's there a month later (hate speech, revenge porn, doxxing etc). Tor / Onionland is even more so a wild west, but that's the double-edged sword of anonymity & free speech. Anonymous voices & actions are sometimes the best voices & actions, but also horrific in equal measure.
That said, dubbing yourself 'unstoppable' & 'uncensorable' just paints a huge target on your back.
I meant it's a double edged sword. For every ten anonymous 'uncensorable' darknet blogs exposing truth and exposing The Conspiracy, there's another ten sites hosting CSAM content.
Mostly sociopaths who don't care because their brains are wired not to do so. What's interesting is why evolution selects for sociopathic brains among us. They are the psychological cuckoos stealing from everyone else. Evolution is weird.
In threads like this, I'm always struck by the absence of discussion from a security-minded, denial-of-service attack perspective.
It seems like, if someone didn't want one of these platforms to succeed, all that would be necessary would be to hire a few people to spam certain taboo words and ideas from various sockpuppet accounts, and then the rest of the world points at it and says, "It seems like everyone on this platform really does just want to scream the N-word in everyone's face all day, deep down. Good luck with your hate speech site."
And, just like that, the new platform is forever known as a haven of hate, never to be used by "respectable" people. Now, back to Reddit and Facebook and Twitter with you, where we can build a profile of everything you've said, cross-reference it with any other accounts you may have, and hide content we don't want you to see. After all, you're not an -ist, are you?
it's legitimately a weakness of the model that it can be targeted like this. being in a place where every other post is a racist screed just isn't fun and I will choose to go somewhere else, regardless of if it's real people or paid trolls
(fwiw, I doubt that the paid trolls are lurking in obscure forums. They're posting on Facebook and Twitter themselves)
It doesn't even have to be something universally understood to be offensive. I wonder what happens when pro-Taiwan posts start appearing? How will China react?
> It makes me wonder whether everyone who is extremely anti-censorship really does just want to scream the N-word in everyone's face all day, deep down.
This is an absolutely ridiculous and tiresome caricature. Honestly, where have you actually seen this? I've seen some fairly "coarse" discussion forums in my time. They're not really to my taste, but I rarely (if ever) see people using the N-word, let alone screaming it in people's faces.
voat, the free speech version of Reddit went down this path very quickly. Most forums don't tolerate obvious hate speech, so the people who want to do that have to go to places that promise 'no moderation'
Voat is a pretty famous and obvious example, sure. But how many people who like to bring up voat actually visited the site or tried to use it? Did you?
For the record, I've never visited voat, so I don't know how accurate the reports are. I can say that I have visited other forums with very lax moderation, and the caricature of "screaming the N-word in everyone's face" doesn't seem accurate.
Generally the reason I avoid unmoderated platforms has little to do with "hate speech" (whatever that is) but more to do with the lack of interesting or original content.
The risk with moderated platforms is this: in whose interest is the moderation being performed? Is the moderation being performed to serve the interests of the platform's users, or is it to serve other interests?
I visited voat on occasion to see how it was working out, mostly checking out the groups that were not inherently political, such as /v/science and /v/movies.
Here is a description of such a visit shortly before they shut down [1].
I generally saw a lot more anti-Jew stuff than anti-Black stuff, but when a Black person came up there was a good chance someone would use the N word.
They could usually even make their anti-Black stuff be about Jews too. For example in /v/movies there was a discussion of the 2020 "Call of the Wild" movie. People were upset that one of the sled dog team drivers was played by a Black actor. They believed this was part of some nefarious plot by the Jews that control Hollywood.
I remember also seeing quite a bit of outrage over Asian and Black actors in The Mandalorian. I think I only saw one post that specifically complained about how absurd it was to have "<N-word>s in space" but a whole lot of agreement with the idea that all the actors in space shows should be white.
I've now visited Voat, and I agree it's pretty terrible.
I still don't think the criticism of anti-censorship movement in general that I responded to is at all accurate, but that doesn't mean there won't be exceptions.
I used voat back when it was called whoaverse, and checked back on it occasionally for years. It was a little sketchy at the beginning but became full on antisemitic propaganda by the end when it closed.
I have some beef with Reddit and I legitimately wanted it to succeed, but I promise you as someone who cared a little about voat, it really was people screaming racial slurs.
Some of this probably has to do with voat getting most of their users when reddit banned fatpeoplehate. I can totally imagine other unmoderated places still being nice. But what happens when one outspoken racist makes their home there? Everyone has to either put up with it or leave.
imo, you have the million dollar question right there. Moderating is hard & thankless work. I hope that someone makes a good federated social media soon
If you didn't want something like this to exist, maybe a good way to get it to be un-enjoyable by the people who want to use it would be to show up and yell intolerable things at the top of your lungs. You can already see many instances in this thread of people assuming that sites like this exist solely for the pleasure of racists, which makes "normal" people think it's not for them. Mission accomplished, all the normies will stick to their "mainstream" sites where content is moderated and they don't have to worry about parsing what is "right" or "wrong" because someone in Mountain View wrote an algorithm that surfaces wrong-think to a minimum wage disposable worker who decides that yes it is wrong-think, and removes it.
Think about this. Last year, if you said that covid might have come from a lab, you were saying something that was obviously wrong, your post should be removed, you should be suspended, and you might be a racist as well. Fast-forward to now, well actually it's pretty possible that it might have come from a lab, maybe we should have talked about that...
The problem to solve with anonymous message boards is getting rid of the bad-faith actors. I think we need a system that allows individuals to subscribe to independent moderators. The central company provides the infrastructure and makes a marketplace where individuals can upload their own ban lists and moderation algorithms that people can subscribe to, allowing you to curate your feed based on many options of moderation. Maybe kinda similar to ad-blockers, some of which get rid of everything and some of which allow some stuff through, that follows standards.
This way the central company is insulated from having to worry about moderation, except to remove obviously illegal content, and individuals get a variety of choices and can't blame some central authority for making decisions on the content they see.
Regardless of your feelings and views, that is still free speech whether you like it or not. What you want is a "platform that only allows what I deem acceptable allowed to be posted". That already exists, it's called reddit.
Edit: And the best part is this is still true regardless of how much you downvote it
At some point you really do have to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt and accept that, yes, people keep making these services because they want to be racist.
Back in April I fired up LBRY when I heard about it. Sounded kinda neat on a technical front.
95% of the page was conspiracy-tards and racists. Noped right off, and haven't been on since.
Just launched it again and the front page shows a video from some asshole talking about how she's discovered that Measles is a sham and SHE has uncovered the fact that NOBODY has proved the existence of virus particles! Also, turns out that PCR is fake, who knew? eyeroll
LBRY is now dominated by "pseudopandemic" vloggers, antivaxxers, 9/11 conspiratards, "population control" conspiratards, "Australia is FALLING!!!"...the list goes on.
There are people who legitimately could use censorship-free platforms, but they're drowned out by all the assholes and morons who think they're being "censored" by (insert boogeyman here) trying to hide THE TRUTH...when really it's that nobody can stand their bigotry/stupidity.
They say it's "undeplatformable", but it's really just a way of screaming into the void because no one is going to want to dig through a pile of trash to find out what they're saying.
I'd say it's a great win-win. They get to spout whatever they want, and no one has to hear it.
I mean that's the beauty of it. I get to choose whether I want to hear Twitter's version of discourse or NoFILTER's version, or neither. So when people I'm unlikely to want to listen to decide to go to NoFILTER, that's a win for me.
I dont think they are mutually exclusive.
Its perfectly possible to create self-regulated forums that function well without big tech being involved.
I think we've have been conditioned to believe that people like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey are the best people to provide this kind of environment. I dont think this is remotely true.
How can there be "self-regulation" on a platform that is "unstoppable, uncensorable, undeplatformable"?
I certainly agree that there are plenty of valuable forums that are not run by tech giants, but they function because they have dedicated moderation and censorship. The trouble is that the set of things I think people should be allowed to say is extremely large, but set of things I want to see in a forum or any sort of social media is much smaller. It doesn't have to be Jack Dorsey at the helm, but someone has to be sweeping up the filth to make a forum a place I want to interact with.
Right now, you are using this thing called the internet. There's a lot of "hate speech" on it, but it doesn't seem to drive everyone else, including you, away.
Oh please. Usenet was a free speech platform. IRC was a free speech platform. The 90s internet was a free speech ecosystem and the prevailing ethos was anti censorship. And guess what? It wasn't an endless hellscape. It was great, mostly.
We're just caught up in the middle of a moral panic and the church ladies from SNL have come out of the woodwork, flapping their arms about how everything is s/satanic/racist.
If saying "good luck with your idea I don't like" is the expression of "moral panic" and church lady from SNL, then that seems like a rather mild panic. Compare that to legislative action to dictate the content of science and history classrooms on matters of race and sex.
It certainly wasn't a big enough deal to prevent everyone else from enjoying the platform. Things worked out. There were problems here and there but by and large people discussed most topics with each other civilly and the system worked without any central authority approving each post.
Probably because they weren't platforms with the sole purpose of being a space for free speech. The problem with these new platforms and sites is that they are generally copies, worse than the originals, of larger platforms that have the only attraction of being free from moderation.
They only see this problem and try to solve it in the worst way. Accepting everything and everyone, offering a confusing experience, financially unattractive and often need to charge dearly for it.
When your article gets published to IPFS, the hash of the contents of the article becomes the name of the file. If one character gets added or removed the hash name changes; therefore, making it impossible to censor.
If a government were to try to block the nofilter.org domain, you can still access the site and the content via hundreds of IPFS gateways around the world as well as through #IPFS directly by downloading the ipfs companion browser extension or by using the Brave browser which natively supports the IPFS protocol.
Here's the same article but hosted on NoFILTER (IPFS) - https://nofilter.org/#/0xae48565bfb998f7cc7855e910345f5b801a...