> I personally think you would be surprised at how much of what we currently have could continue to work in a world without Section 230

Hackernews wouldn't.

I advocate for digital rights online; particularly the Right to Communicate[0]. But the Right to Communicate goes hand in hand with the Right to Filter[1]. Human moderation isn't a shortcut, it's the backbone of small, cozy forums and independent sites. Human moderation on a personalized scale is what makes smaller communities so much nicer than giant algorithmically curated platforms like Twitter or Youtube.

The way we marry the Right to Filter and the Right to Communicate is with systems like the Fediverse that make it easy for people to form new communities on the fly, to join and leave existing communities without any pain or fuss, and to copy their content around or download it out of data silos whenever they'd like to. While we give users that convenience, we also recognize that communities have an inalienable right to organize themselves and filter the content that they host and see. In this way, the Right to Communicate and the Right to Filter reinforce each other, filling in the problematic gaps and abuses that either right would have in isolation.

Section 230 is what makes that possible. Decentralization isn't magic. The law and the DOJ will attack community organizers and label them as publishers regardless of whether or not they are personally hosting the content in their communities. It doesn't matter what architecture you use; if you're going to have an open community someplace, that community needs to be able to enforce its own rules and norms. And Section 230 will make them liable if they attempt to do so.

And even outside of the Fediverse, so much of the Internet matters.

To hear you very lightly say something like:

> and, what doesn't translate, was maybe not worth preserving in the first place

I'm almost not sure how to respond to a claim like that. HN isn't worth preserving? IRC channels aren't worth preserving? Matrix isn't worth preserving? Self-publishing storefronts, independent forums, and comment sections on blogs aren't worth preserving? Email isn't worth preserving?

> Signal equating a loss of Section 230 with somehow not being able to have end-to-end encryption

For Signal, no, maybe not. For a lot of other services, including the vast majority of the Fediverse, yes. I think your reading of Signal's status as a distributor is pretty reasonable. But don't jump from that reading to saying that this won't have an impact on encryption.

Signal is a zero-knowledge, closed communication platform. It's not decentralized, it has essentially no moderation of any kind, and it has no communities of any kind. An open community with its own norms, memes, and content standards is not zero-knowledge about the content it's hosting. A law that meant that only closed, blind systems like Signal could make use of E2E encryption wouldn't eliminate all encryption, but it would restrict a large number of platforms from using encryption to make themselves more private and more secure.

[0]: https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-communicate

[1]: https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-filter