Censorship is the suppression or control of speech, communication, or information by a governing body or authority, often resulting in a lack of free expression and limited user autonomy.
Imagine you’ve been using a social platform to share your thoughts and connect with others. One day, you notice that your posts are disappearing or are no longer visible to your friends. Your reach is being reduced, and your voice is being silenced. This is an example of censorship at play—when someone else decides what you can and cannot say online, and what others can and cannot see.
Why Censorship is Inevitable
Censorship is inevitable in today’s web because many popular services, like social platforms, require centralized hosting. These platforms need servers to store data, deliver content, and provide other services. As long as centralized servers are involved, someone—be it the server owner, government authority, or a corporate entity—can decide what content is allowed and what is not.
The reality is that many centralized platforms serve millions of users, which makes them natural targets for censorship. Server operators can be pressured to comply with local laws or corporate policies, meaning that user content can be restricted, removed, or filtered at any time.
However, this doesn’t mean we should accept censorship without a solution. Instead, we need systems that assume censorship is likely and empower users to navigate around it.
How Pubky Addresses Censorship
In Pubky, the approach is not to eliminate censorship entirely—because some level of censorship will always exist where there are centralized components—but rather to provide users with a way to circumvent it when it happens.
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Flexible Hosting: Pubky provides a flexible hosting model using trusted servers known as homeservers. While these servers may be subject to censorship, Pubky ensures that users have the ability to migrate away from a censoring server whenever needed. Users can move their data, identities, and connections seamlessly, meaning they retain control even in the face of censorship.
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Decentralized Identity: In Pubky, user identities are not dependent on any single server. By using self-issued public keys, users maintain their identity even if they change hosting providers. This prevents identity loss when moving away from a server that engages in censorship.
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Data Portability and Redundancy: Pubky ensures that user data can be exported and re-imported across servers without any loss. Users can also use multiple servers for redundancy, minimizing the risk of any single point of failure or censorship cutting them off from their data.
Important Aspects of Censorship Resistance
- Data Control: Users should always have access to and control over their data, even if one hosting provider chooses to censor it. Pubky’s approach empowers users by ensuring they are not dependent on any one server.
- Migration and Interoperability: The ability to migrate data, identities, and connections between different homeservers helps users remain resilient against censorship. Interoperable systems mean that even if one provider blocks content, another can provide access.
- Local Copies and Self-Hosting: Users can keep local copies of their data, and Pubky encourages self-hosting, giving users more control over what happens to their information and ensuring their content is not subjected to centralized oversight.
Challenges and Considerations
- Legal Compliance: Censorship is often tied to legal requirements that hosting providers must comply with. Even decentralized systems will face challenges related to legal jurisdictions, and Pubky is designed to navigate but not entirely eliminate these legal issues.
- Content Moderation: Some forms of moderation are necessary—whether it’s to filter out spam or harmful content. Pubky facilitates user-controlled moderation, where individuals or groups decide what they want to see, rather than a centralized authority imposing a one-size-fits-all policy.
- Redundancy Limitations: While Pubky’s redundancy and migration features provide resilience, they depend on the presence of multiple homeservers options. During the early phases, users may face limited availability of alternative servers.
Censorship on the web is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean users have to be powerless. With Pubky, you have the ability to choose your hosting, migrate your data, and maintain your identity—all key tools for resisting censorship. Pubky’s design assumes censorship will happen and provides the mechanisms needed to overcome it. This empowers users with true control, ensuring that no single entity can unilaterally suppress their voice. The future of the web lies in resilient, user-first systems that put individuals back in control of their online presence.