content: The quote was from Tim Beners-Lee, not me. For some reason Voat erased the quote marks.  Coerced self censorship immediately precludes any notion of a free exchange of ideas and opinions. And there's much more to this as well. If you and I, and a thousand other people, would like to have a conversation it's rather silly that we're left to rely on a centralized server. If Voat goes down, we're disconnected. If Voat runs out of money, we're disconnected. If Voat gets hacked, we're disconnected. If Atko sells the site we're left to just hope the new owner follows a similar model, or we're disconnected. I could go on. It's rather bizarre too. Voat is open source and we could in theory trivially clone it, but nobody does. Why? Because setting up the server, buying a domain, and all of this is annoying and cumbersome - especially for something that's at best a passing curiosity. Oh yeah and if it does get popular, get ready to start shelling out the big bucks. This is all so silly and completely unnecessary. Peer to peer solves so many problems. I think if the internet were reinvented today we wouldn't even consider client-server. The only issue is that it's much more difficult to implement for the people actually designing the structure. Well that and as the article mentions, when the internet was initially designed things like public key encryption (which would play a critical role in a decentralized internet) were illegal to distribute.