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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Well, this is a more philosophical question, but it is a result of misaligned incentives and not because someone is having some evil master-plan. Most of today's Facebook like sites didn't start out as evil empires, they became so basically by necessity once they chose a certain trajectory. The only way to prevent that is to have strong defense mechanisms in place from the very beginning and that then can easily appear as the other extreme.
But only accepting one possible alternative is an extreme. You can build in safeguards... but if they're too rigorous you will drive away potential users. Much like with freedom and security, you need to middle ground between accessibility and defensibility.
No one talks about only one possible alternative, but it is often not immediately obvious to laypersons why a defense mechanism is vital to have and can not be made a middle ground. Like for example there is no way to weaken end to end encryption a little bit to scan for CSAM, without breaking it entirely.
If there's only ever one avenue of attack, sure. Your example posits that encryption is the only security layer that exists, which is laughable. Most security breaches happen at the personnel level, not the technical one.
A site does not "become facebook" just because it's not 100% decentralized from every other possible service. Countless other factors go into it. Not the least of which is the nature of the people running it. If you run a service, and make it nigh impossible for a general public (your main market) to use because you fear it will become compromised, you are basically saying that you will compromise it otherwise, and probably shouldn't be running that service.
No, this isn't about individual persons turning bad or something silly like that. You can't have a little decentralization either, for economic reasons. Once you get large instances in a supposedly decentralized network these by necessity need to professionalize sooner or later. Which means they need to find investors and a way to gain income from it. And then the enshittification commences... it is naive to believe that you as the founder are immune to that and if you try to resist it, the investors and other staff will find a way to push you out.