Commun & Steemit - freedom above all!

Powerful post from CTO Commun:

It’s been 2 months since we launched Commun/ in a Cyberway mainnet and it appears that the machine that we’ve built works well in practice. However, lots of users still have questions about how Commun/ works.

Commun/, in the first place, is people united by shared interests and the interaction between them. People have vast experience in creating and organizing communities, for example, communes, diasporas, volunteering, cooperatives, associations, and so on. At the end of the 20th century one of the most significant communities of our times emerged - the internet community. At first sight, the architecture was as easy as all works of genius: decentralized and free. You could surf the ocean of websites of people from all around the world, going from one hyperlink to another; or create your website and publish everything of your interest - articles, pics, programs, links to the websites that you liked, and others would post links to yours.

Seemed idyllic, right? Yet you already know how this all ended. It’s now considered that our data doesn’t belong to us anymore. If before we could publish our webpage even on our computer, then now we are forced to provide all our data to the internet giants.

Apart from this, throughout the development of the internet, governments and corporations became very interested in it, which led to the problems of political censorship and copyright-related limitations. Social networks can ban or delete our accounts if their content doesn’t fit the rules, or you can even be prosecuted for just one careless post. We’ve lost the decentralization, and therefore freedom.

And here we are again, thinking if we should get decentralization back but in another form, one that lacks the flaws of the first try.

Developing Commun/, we wanted to create an environment and a set of tools that will allow people to create fully self-governed communities. Often when discussing communities, the term “freedom of speech” appears in the context - indeed, it is the value that we share. However, equally often “freedom of speech” comes as cover for expressing ideas that contravene the ethical norms of the sane democratic society of the 21st century. This is why it is necessary to follow particular rules.