All "online" decentralization efforts are still centralized to some extent in some manner. Most people don't care about the software system, they just want ease of use. Any user interface using some sort of decentralized effort still has to be programmed and maintained by people, which can at any time decide to start censoring. Since it's decentralized, you can't stop them from censoring either. It's all the same in the end. Those that control the software can censor. The reason these decentralized communication software interfaces never take-off is because of the lack of software supporting it. You aren't going to attract mass adoption if the usability and interface resembles that of some dos program 30 years ago. As soon as the software becomes good, it tends to become centralized.
Take for example email. Email was a decentralized system where you could connect to port 25 on any mail system anywhere and have it forward your mail to other systems, hold it cached for days or weeks if they were offline, and eventually get it to the recipient. Minds somebody with the data has to be online when you want it, so email was even way more decentralized than Minds.
Google has strong-armed changes so email can only be sent encrypted by whitelisted, certified servers and have forced most other companies to do the same. So now you effectively can't run your own email server on your own domain because nobody will talk to it.
So Minds could be even more vulnerable than Gab since it's probably a lot easier to turn a small group of developers than a single fanatic.
All "online" decentralization efforts are still centralized to some extent in some manner. Most people don't care about the software system, they just want ease of use. Any user interface using some sort of decentralized effort still has to be programmed and maintained by people, which can at any time decide to start censoring. Since it's decentralized, you can't stop them from censoring either. It's all the same in the end. Those that control the software can censor. The reason these decentralized communication software interfaces never take-off is because of the lack of software supporting it. You aren't going to attract mass adoption if the usability and interface resembles that of some dos program 30 years ago. As soon as the software becomes good, it tends to become centralized.
Take for example email. Email was a decentralized system where you could connect to port 25 on any mail system anywhere and have it forward your mail to other systems, hold it cached for days or weeks if they were offline, and eventually get it to the recipient. Minds somebody with the data has to be online when you want it, so email was even way more decentralized than Minds.
Google has strong-armed changes so email can only be sent encrypted by whitelisted, certified servers and have forced most other companies to do the same. So now you effectively can't run your own email server on your own domain because nobody will talk to it.
So Minds could be even more vulnerable than Gab since it's probably a lot easier to turn a small group of developers than a single fanatic.