Centralization has another aspect that is simultaneously both good and bad: you can easily remove offensive content and problematic users. A centralized approach makes it very easy to remove cancerous people, groups, and content, while a decentralized approach makes that far harder. But in a centralized system, who defines what is cancerous content, et al.? Reddit did a great job at removing racist content, for instance (or, if you go back farther, they removed ‘jailbait’ and ‘creepshots’ communities, which were producing content that was just on the line of being obscene). But they also took a “both sides are bad” approach when it came to literal nazis v. antifascists.
I’m a Reddit refugee, so it’s going to take me a while to learn to navigate this. And yeah, I’ve been kicked off Twitter, so Mastodon was already on my radar.
Bingo. It would also make it trivial to alter images just enough so that it wouldn’t match the hash, and then they can post shit that would need to be manually flagged and removed.
I already see things like this with pirated media; pirates will include extraneous material bundled with the target media so that it’s not automatically flagged and removed.