As someone who founded an org to build decentralized tech with, for & by marginalized communities I always find variations of this take naive & facile. It ignores both the ethos of decentralized tech as well as the practicalities and realities of how tech serves different groups. https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/1350451788139421696

I say facile because if you ignore the underlying complexity then the argument "you can't build a censorship-tolerant decentralized technology" is actually correct by definition - but that is all it is, a definition.

Actual marginalized communities, like queer people and sex workers (the two heavily intersecting groups I predominantly build tech for) have been heavily censored by large social tech companies for as long as there have been large social tech companies - this isn't new ground.

And the problems faced by those communities i.e. safety and state censorship are in many cases orthogonal to those faced by fascists. An even what overlap exists (i.e. demonetization / financial censorship) is rooted in different justifications (puritanism v.s. optics)

Decentralized tech extends well beyond the pale replications of centralized platforms that most get discussed, even beyond federate enclaves. There exist problems of centralized power beyond broadcast publishing.

And at this point I must address the fact that "peer-to-peer" is an action in addition to an architecture. It is fundamentally described and protected by the right to free association and it's creepy by any measure to be worried about too much, too accessible, free association.

But I don't have to invoke fundamental ideals of human rights to demonstrate why the whole idea around "if you build tech for marginalized people you are defacto building it for fascists" is just plain wrong. (I did it anyway because it's an important reminder)

The problems I've worked on in recent years are focused on harm reduction. Allowing people to be themselves and hopefully even enjoy life and exist in a world that often puts them at risk. The core question always centres around mitigating and surfacing risk.

The core ethos of decentralized technology is distributing power, dissolving risk across the ecosystem, resisting surveillance and avoiding censorship. Decentralization isn't exactly harm reduction, but it's a very good start.

Case in point because it's a good illustrative example ( https://twitter.com/avsa/status/1350471376990330880) - much of sex worker organizing is already done through (manual/irl) p2p networks, referrals, shared bad-dates lists etc. P2P tech can fit into and enhance those flows.

Providing harm-reductive technological enhancements through those flows utilizing decentralized tech doesn't help fascists because they don't have those problems or have other resources to solve them.

And that is the heart of why I find the takes around decentralization/radicalization/moderation frustrating. Because it presents a single usecase (summarized as "people can publish *anything* and *anyone* can read it! the horror!!") as *the* thing and proceeds on that premise.

It ignores all the work, all the communities that have been building these infrastructures for decades to mitigate real-world harm and reduces that necessary work to a narrative counterbalance.

Anyway, if you want to read about some of the work that we do @OpenPriv and help contribute to our mission please check out: https://openprivacy.ca/work/