For all the scepticism and criticism around Gab and Torba (especially given the recent data leak), I can have a great amount of respect for a man whose principle is literally "If they ban us, we'll build our own service" - especially given that he relies a fair bit on open-source. No website that caters to his views, so he creates one (using Mastodon source code, then altered). YouTube is unwelcoming, so he creates Gab TV (worse, but an alternative). He decides he wants a global comment feature, so he builds Dissenter browser (forking Brave's open-source code; outdated version, but fills a niche). Web servers refuse to host him, so (to my knowledge) he becomes self-hosted. Banks decline him, so he allows cryptocurrencies and sees about getting his own bank. It's all very impressive, and it makes me want to throw my money at him.

> I would say that they dominate on the internet because they are smelly, sedentary ne'er-do-wells I would argue that it's demographics. There is a rural-urban divide around politics (urban people are more left-wing, and that effect increases depending on size of the city), an age divide (young people are more left-wing), and a wealth divide (wealthier people are more left-wing). Now, which demographic groups would you say are most likely to (1) have access to the internet, and (2) be able to spend the most time on it? You guessed it - young, wealthy urbanites. Youth is associated with digital literacy (and lack of job means more free time), wealth can also be associated with more leisure time and better connection speeds, and urbanism is also associated with access to the internet. I want to strongly highlight the urban divide, because it's something often overlooked, but it is one of the biggest influences on political values. Yes, you *can* be conservative in a city, but overall city-dwellers have a much higher average of "progressives" than village-dwellers. By all means, we could argue why (is it just because progressives move to cities - i.e. correlation doesn't equal causation - or is it an actual effect of the social atmosphere?), but it's still a correlation. Either way, it is certain that urban populations will have higher internet usage than rural populations, by virtue of having better connection speeds due to the infrastructure, being more likely to have any access, and being more likely to have had access for longer. On that side of things, just think of where the initial users of the internet will have came from (once it gained mainstream appeal): New York, Los Angeles, Chicago; London, Berlin, Madrid, Paris etc. - the size of these cities allows their populations to dominate, and their worldview to dominate also, especially when the rural populations that would often counterbalance them in their respective countries simply haven't gotten access (regardless of wealth, regardless of age) to the infrastructure at that given point.

Well (again, only from my understanding of the tutorials), it seems I can provide a bit of a response to both. For the two questions, the answer is interlinked. Starting with the second question (whether a bad actor could name their website as something legitimate-sounding), while I agree with you that names will need to eventually be used (hashes aren't exactly human-usable/good for memorisation, and they acknowledge this in one of the tutorials), it seems that their system is largely linked to a form of hash value (what they refer to as CDIs - or "content identifiers") at the moment. Given that these CDIs have multiple references within their syntax that are important, it's hard to imagine that they'll change the format, although it doesn't seem the most intuitive. For any malicious actor (as with any fork and/or versioning), therefore, it is simply the case that any new content (which includes modifications to existing content) is given a new randomised CDI value. Moving back to the first question (How can we trust the source?), I can only assume that there is the expectation that "safe" versions might somehow be brought to people's attention and propagated? The more I consider it - working on my own understanding, rather than anything explicitly in the tutorial - I seem to be of the understanding that every website may act as a sort-of "cache" or snapshot. I assume that dynamic content in websites will be catered for in some way - I cannot imagine that a IFPS Ruqqus would have every post creating a new CDI code - but I also do not know how such a thing would work from what I've read, either.

The IPFS website guided me to [this link of interactive tutorials](https://proto.school), which I've been making my way through. From what I've read (particularly on what it describes as Merkle DAGs), it seems to address some of what you've said. It is all very complicated to get my head around, so I may be somewhat inaccurate in my retelling. On the question of if it would have to be centralised, the answer is no - they actually do a specific part about versioning explaining it, and noting that Git is apparently based on the same system. Basically, each "version" is created as something of a separate DAG (basically, tree hierarchy), with links ("edges"/intermediaries) from each tree to duplicate content (i.e. the software is able to detect identical content, and prevent duplication by design). There is a structure to the hashing that starts from the bottom node (leaf) up to the top node (root), whereupon changes to a node impact the hash code of every ancestor node as a consequence. This prevents "anarchy" because, it is stated, any malicious actor trying upload alteration of the content (or, for example, any different versioning) would lead to a completely different hash being produced. My understanding is that this makes everything permanent - an example in the tutorial notes that, even if one section was deleted and replaced with another ("cats" with "dogs", for example), the previous section would still exist. That still begs the question, though, as to how they would find the "correct" hash/root node to begin with. It also seems to make the idea of online archiving entirely redundant. Based on the tutorial, I am of the understanding that sha2-256 encryption is used by default.