Is it filled with the type of people that one might wish major governments could stop, though?

ZeroNet

What’s up on ZeroNet these days?

Capitalism runs on top of government. Governments create and enforce the notion that a human, or a fictional human with fractional ownership (corporation), can in turn own arbitrarily large and important objects.

This is often done at the behest of said arbitrarily-large-and-important-thing-owners, who also come up with other similarly terrible ideas to have the government do.

Probably not any existing systems; you can still finger and thus demand censorship from a block producer, and you end up with situations where you just can’t host the chain anymore because it’s full of pirated MP3s or whatever now.

And they introduce new problems around having to globally replicate everything and thus getting the net performance out of the system that you get from the worst server involved.

If you need to track some kind of root signing key for a whole p2p system, or something, maybe you can stuff it into Ethereum somewhere. But I don’t think you can get very far trying to actually run a service out of a globally replicated database, and even then you’d have hundreds of operators in legal trouble rather than no operator.

Something like Tor only solves half the problem. A Tor hidden service still has physical reality and a person who is hosting it, and who can be held responsible for failing to register the thing with the feds or file a moderation transparency report or whatever the latest nonsense is. The anonymity network helps to hide where the equipment and who the operator is, but there’s still a single point of failure and a person to blame for the community.

We need a way to run online communities that are not online services: no single point of failure, no individual or partnership describable as a service’s operator, and no meaningful way in which one person provides access to the system to another person.

You may be looking for The Promised LAN.