>Decentralization just puts people that run servers as middle men to further impose a censorship agenda with ActivityPub.

Name lookup is not like a social media feed. If a server is censoring, say, TPB, it's plainly obvious, because you'll go to the IP and not get the content you expected. Just move on to the next server on the list until you find one with the up-to-date information.

>Whatever it is it needs to be distributed like BitTorrent.

DNS is already a distributed system like BitTorrent. When you publish an IP update you do it to a single node, which then propagates through the network. The deplatforming problem of DNS is that name assignment is something only central authorities can grant and revoke.

It also makes it very difficult to censor. There is 1 YouTube and thousands of ActivityPub servers and relays that would happily carry all posts through the fediverse regardless if they seize one or two hosts. There are other options as well - that was a bit my point that Medium/X/Bluesky/YouTube - these are designed to harvest engagement in exchange for content. They’re not good for news and certainly not good as an archive.

In theory yes, but in practice, most of the traffic will gravitate to popular servers and the popular ones will be targeted by people that want to censor content and force the gatekeepers to silence content. The ones that don't play along wont matter because they are not that visible.