Ask HN: Why have communities?

The original Internet was basically a network of networks. Today, that has resulted in essentially a feudal society online, with GMail hosting most people’s email, Facebook hosting their “social” timelines, Twitter hosting their tweets and so on.

In the early 2000s, networks like Bittorrent used Kademlia trees to break this apart and make one giant decentralized network. The SAFE network continues that today. Scuttlebutt is a way to propagate one-writer append-only logs.

So I want to ask: why do we really need communities like Craigslist or HN? They can have admins to censor and ban you, but what if a small subgroup wants to hear what you have to say? Why does everyone need to know that joe22 is the same guy in the community, and upvote/downvote his posts? Why do you need to put your real name on a server? Is it just so that classmates from 20 years can find you? Bill Gates doesn’t put his real name on his personal FB profile, or list his email address publicly. Why should you? You have an address book, those are the people you care about. They may have different identities in your addressbook than someone else’s, and it’s up to them to prove they are the same person, or not.

Perhaps it’s enough to not have centralized hubs at all, and just have each person’s network start from the address book on their personal client device. People should choose how to sync and share their information, and servers should just be dumb boxes storing redundant encrypted info. Why not?