I'm not claiming conspiracy.
You suggested that there were reasons other than the technical and in fact which directly contravene what they've stated publicly as their goals and interests that they haven't gone with another, more decentralized solution. While that doesn't involve a second party with whom they are colluding, that doesn't make it any less a conspiracy theory.
I suppose it would be less casually conversational to suggest that you are simply saying that they were lying when they were saying that they wanted things to be more decentralized and they specifically referred to technologies (IPFS/Web Torrent/DAT) which are explicitly decentralized, in exactly the comment to which I was replying, but it seemed more polite to suggest that you are simply engaging in conspiratorial thought than calling the developers outright liars.
If you want to get down to the brass tacks of it.
So the real question is how to distribute the data in a way that takes advantage of some aspects of decentralization while retaining the control to censor, because let's face it... even though many of us are willing to accept the consequences of decentralization in the interest of freedom, the vast majority are not.
Contention without facts in evidence.
Worse, deliberate prejudicial word choice with "censor."
Again, you make the argument that they're not interested in true decentralization, despite what they say. Do you have any reason to not take them at their word? Seriously. I can make shit up, too, and I'm probably better at it, but when I do it I generally try to not do so when the people I'm talking about are literally reading me calling them out as a liar.
I have no reason to believe that the developers of DTube (@heimindanger in specific in this case) want to do anything more than provide themselves a certain measure of legal insulation, and that's why their nod to the DMCA is about the least they can get away with while still saying, "sure, we're complying with the spirit of the law."
Which is about all anyone reasonable can do until they have the ability to do something better.
(I've already fought the fight of pointing out that the rough decentralization of the Steemit blockchain without actually being decentralized beyond most of the database traffic being served by a fistful of servers provides a legal vulnerability for people who have already been engaging in practices which are of questionable legal nature on Steemit. Nobody wants to hear it, so I'm not fighting it again.)
Honestly, the issue is not whether "many of us are willing to accept the consequences of decentralization," but whether or not the developers of DTube are willing to accept the consequences of decentralization – and from their very own statements in this thread, they are interested in and willing to bear those consequences.
It's disingenuous to state otherwise.
I may be wrong, but it sounds to me like your focusing mainly on the benefits of decentralization from a technical standpoint and what that means for computing and I completely agree with that viewpoint.
Considering that we are literally talking about the pros and cons of backend data warehousing for a video repository at a technical level, it probably shouldn't come as a surprise to any reasonable person that I'm focusing mainly on the benefits of decentralization from a technical standpoint. The issues with and surrounding central authority and its flexibility are simply not part of this discussion, not until you decided to drag them in during the process of making shit up.
Until people wake up and accept the personal responsibility that's required for our freedom we will never have true decentralization (or freedom for that matter). People not wanting that responsibility is what got us into the mess were in in the first place.
Remember that suggestion that you were engaging in conspiratorial thought earlier on?
You're doing it again.
You're also trying to drag in social issues which have no place in this particular conversation, no matter how hard you try to make them an element of what were talking about.
The question of whether freedom is a scalar, whether personal responsibility is a requirement for decentralized architectures, and the state of being in the world today are not on the table. They're not even important to this discussion. They were never important to this discussion.
If you want to talk about those things, go create your own post which we can all ignore at our leisure. But at the moment, we're talking about the technical backend of DTube and the developer's stated intention to use decentralized storage technology and their current decision to go with a more enterprise and centralized solution for what they state is a temporary situation because they want to use more decentralized solutions.
First off, I'm still not sure what you are claiming is conspiracy theory. I may not have worded something perfectly for you, but I have never claimed conspiracy. D-tube claims they want to decentralize... ok then. What exactly does that mean? Distributed or actually decentralized? Because if they mean to truly decentralize which means giving up the ability to censor without the vote of the majority then that 100% brings legal and social aspects into the matter. Who would be liable for copyright infringement, "hate speech" or anything else illegal or questionable? These things absolutely do matter, it just seems that everyone wait's until after the fact to address them.
If D-tube took a truly decentralized approach then they have to give up the ability to censor. This would have to be accompanied by the majority support of the people. People can't claim they want that freedom for themselves while at the same time holding D-tube or any similar platform liable for what someone else posts that they don't like. My point here is that as of right now this approach will not work and only succeed in getting D-tube into massive legal troubles without the support of the people in order to overturn the laws that specifically prohibit this type of model. As I don't see that happening any time soon, any efforts spent on this particular approach will be wasted.
So, the only other option is distributing the data while maintaining control over it. Unfortunately as of right now this is the only way that would work both legally and socially. I fail to understand how you think the social aspect of a social media platform is irrelevant to the technical implementation of said platform.
Now please correct me if I'm wrong, but as I stated before I believe anyone can already manually re-host any videos on D-tube to support whatever content they want. So if that's the case then it would seem to me that that model is already partially implemented, so the best way to expand on that would be to create a piece of software that both incentivises and automates the process in a similar way to how decentralized storage applications have done it. I do not mean to actually adopt any of those applications as a solution and figure out how to then make it viewable. I simply mean adopt the general ideas of how they handle the contracting and automation end of things while expanding on the functionality that D-tube already has.
Now please... continue to elaborate on how I'm engaging in conspiracy theory... or how social and legal issues are irrelevant to the technical implementation of a social media platform that's trying to balance freedom of speech and information with questionable or outright illegal content especially when it relates to a potential decentralized approach spanning globally over all legal jurisdictions. Please... enlighten me!
Oh, I see now. Your mistaking my sarcasm for conspiracy. Sorry about that, sarcasm doesn't always come out right in text.