content: No, it cannot. There are two basic types of connections in networks. Client-server and peer-to-peer. Voat is an example of client server. You connect to a server and that server in turn delivers all your content to you. It's a single point of failure. If the company that hosts Voat decided they don't want to tomorrow then everything would be lost until the site could be moved to a new server and the process repeats. Peer to peer is the other way. Torrents are (mostly) peer to peer. Instead of one server delivering all the content peers connect to each other and share content. Shutting down one peer doesn't do anything at all in terms of the availability of content. In light of all the recent attacks on the internet ranging from censorship to increasingly invasive copyright measures many folks, including the scientists behind the original development of the internet, are starting to push for more decentralized and peer-to-peer type internet. The main reason this wasn't how things started is that client-server is just a whole lot easier. But outside of the initial technical implementations, peer to peer is vastly superior in just about every way. For instance it naturally scales. Think about client-server systems. When Voat saw massive growth the site began breaking simply because the server couldn't take it. But now think about a torrented file that's very popular. Lots of people torrent it but that means lots of people are also sharing it and so there's absolutely 0 impact on its availability. If anything as sites grow in a peer-to-peer environment they tend to become more reliable. Peer to peer networks are impossible to shut down. Even if you killed off the internet as we know it (by, for instance disabling all ISPs), peer to peer networks would be able to rapidly and seamlessly migrate to begin developing a new internet using any sort of available and shared network capacity - such as wireless connections.