I reckon we can have a decent decentralized forum protocol if FTTH (100 Mbps upload) becomes the baseline.
With ADSL (1 Mbps upload) it's not really possible... ADSL is fine for BTC, that's why Satoshi released it in 2009 (when ADSL was already becoming the norm).
I believe that a decentralized forum wouldn't necessarily be determined by bandwidth or internet speed. A good solution should be more lightweight, if anything.
I'm afraid you don't understand the fact that a forum has WAY MORE traffic compared to a decentralized payment system exchanging a few numbers here and there.
So no, it's not going to be more lightweight, quite the contrary!
The code itself determines how efficient content is delivered. For a user, the lightness and efficiency of the code determines how fast a site loads. In terms of traffic handling on the provider side, this also comes down to code
Generally, decentralized applications are lighter in weight...how well they handle their traffic depends on how well they are coded. I believe bitcointalk could be recoded into a platform that is decentralized, that can handle large amounts of traffic and is governed in a decentralized way (described in next part of this post)
This is an opinion anyway....
Rules govern what is allowed and what is not...if members agree to those rules and have a form of governance power over these rules through voting, then moderation should only be to enforce those rules that the majority of the community already agrees on, posts removed in line with that technically wouldn't be censorship, posts removed for other purposes would be.
Two things to comment.
- Governments strive to censor all sort of speeches all the time, and they are elected by the majority most of the time. So no. Not only it
is technically censorship, but it is almost a common phenomenon that happens to minorities.
- There has never been a truly decentralized protocol where each user can have equal voting power.
I was talking more about if the forum were to be decentralized. I wouldn't call any democracy decentralized, since there'd be so many powerful entities aiming at manipulating apparent democratic systems for their interests.
Decentralization isn't a 1/0, there are scales as to how decentralized something is. However, BitcoinTalk has a high potential for decentralization, if done correctly. For example, if a governance token was released that airdropped 1 token based on a variety of factors, like trust, posts, merits, etc, then you'd have a system where yes, not everyone will be equal, however there will be a lot of people governing and contributing, therefore a good level of decentralization will be achieved.
Equal voting power is not good governance. Good governance is where those who earned (not bought) their say have the reflected value of their say to begin with. If they sell that say to someone else, that's the free market, though that should come after distributing power to those who earned it.
That's my opinion anyway, good governance is still something that to this day, no one has perfected.