Why did nobody just make an exclusively right wing alternative to mastodon?
…but they did, and were broadly prevented from growing organically. See Parler and Gab.
Gab actually changed it’s underlying backend twice. They started with their own thing, Google and Apple cut their app off from the app stores so they switched to something that was a common protocol rather than a dedicated app and moved to Mastodon as a way to route around censorship. Most Mastodon servers promptly defederated them for being right wingers, and several of the major Mastodon clients built in client level mandatory blacklists causing their client to refuse to connect to Gab (in some cases Gab was the entire blacklist) - you can see which ones because they have some older store reviews about “refusing to connect to the largest Mastodon instance” because for a time that was Gab. Later on, they moved to something involving crypto somehow, I’m not really sure about the details.
Parler appeared, got big fast, got kneecapped by Google, Apple and Amazon and by the time they recovered had lost most of any momentum they ever had.
They even produced their own Reddit-alike, spread across several .win domains - that was a thing that happened in response to the biggest Trumper community getting banned from Reddit. That original community migrated to TheDonald.win and later rebranded as Patriots.win.
Truth Social is basically what Gab/Parler wanted to be, but big Tech doesn’t want to fight against Trump because he’s exactly the kind of petty asshole to fuck them over for considering it. Truth Social is of course Mastodon under the hood with federation disabled.
But if we presume fediverse apps are a protocol rather than a proprietary product (which is usually how they are sold to users, making analogies to things like email or the web as compared to a proprietary system) why would you need to reinvent the wheel? No one is arguing that we need an exclusively communist alternative to email or the web.
Actually truth social would be the perfect example, but again, how many people do you hear talking about how much they enjoy truth social? It’s true nobody wants to be sued by Trump, but that’s not really support as much as fear and its own form of censorship.
Truth Social is always there if you want it, but is it really censorship that keeps more people from using it or is it to some extent capitalism working?
If you have a truly free market people will just go to another platform bc there’s no reason they have to use X, or Truth Social, or Mastodon, or BlueSky unless one person (or a group of oligarchs) buys all of them and controls the market. If one of those platforms fails, can you really blame it on censorship?
Musk bought X bc he claimed he wanted to have free speech and to get rid of all the bots, but he did neither. Now that place is mainly a bot fueled echo chamber. It’s just not an enjoyable platform to use anymore, and most users have switched to an alternative like bluesky.
I personally don’t really like Bluesky either, but I know a lot of people that do. Even though it’s not a right wing platform, it’s still seems very difficult for content to actually reach people organically. The same is true with Substack, and you have even less control of the content that appears on your feed. I hate IG for that reason too (among many others).
Algorithm control and bot armies always eventually becomes a weird form of censorship. It happens on every platform (even lemmy to a lesser extent), and at a certain point it makes the platform just unusable. There are definitely accounts like that on Mastodon too, and I still use it for some things but don’t really interact much on there bc of the same reason.
It’s almost like an uncanny valley situation. Like at a certain point the bots go from a tool that helps to generate user interest and grow a platform, to just over saturating and creating dead internet vibes. Like you can tell when a narrative is being controlled or generated by a sudden swarm of users and it’s very off-putting.
Reddit has gotten so bad about this that you will have posts that just can’t be upvoted at all, with like a hilariously impossible ratio of upvotes to comments. Then those “user” recommendation posts that are clearly just advertisements are the worst. I used to rely on Reddit for advice and information on things like that bc I was talking to other humans without an agenda to sell me something. Now I usually just assume any recommendation on Reddit is an advertisement and ignore it.
Google and Apple cut their app off from the app stores so they switched to something that was a common protocol rather than a dedicated app and moved to Mastodon as a way to route around censorship
Apple and Google didn’t want to lose business by associating with something the majority of people found off-putting, but is that really censorship?
Again you’re relying on an existing platform to take on supporting your messaging instead of just promoting it yourself. Couldn’t you just rely on a user base sharing a link to download an app rather than putting it in one of the stores?
No one is arguing that we need an exclusively communist alternative to email or the web.
But that is also why so many users or instances block instances like .grad and to a lesser extent .ml, and some people do argue they should be de-federated.
I don’t think that’s really necessary. I’m glad to have the ability to talk to and interact with people I don’t agree with on everything. There’s .ml users here that have been very helpful with things nobody else was able to help me with. (I’m actually glad we’re able to have this conversation we’re having.)
But, I’ve also been blocked from .ml communities without any warning bc I shared images of Xinnie the Pooh. So, i’m sure there are some people on the left who willingly identify as tankies, and would enjoy a completely separate dedicated safe space on the internet for communism or leftist authoritarianism. If they made one, it would very likely end up running into the same issues as Gab/Parler, but I still wouldn’t believe that censorship is to blame for its failure.
It’s just difficult to create a market for a very niche and exclusionary product that a lot of people find off-putting due to extremist content.
…but they did, and were broadly prevented from growing organically. See Parler and Gab.
Gab actually changed it’s underlying backend twice. They started with their own thing, Google and Apple cut their app off from the app stores so they switched to something that was a common protocol rather than a dedicated app and moved to Mastodon as a way to route around censorship. Most Mastodon servers promptly defederated them for being right wingers, and several of the major Mastodon clients built in client level mandatory blacklists causing their client to refuse to connect to Gab (in some cases Gab was the entire blacklist) - you can see which ones because they have some older store reviews about “refusing to connect to the largest Mastodon instance” because for a time that was Gab. Later on, they moved to something involving crypto somehow, I’m not really sure about the details.
Parler appeared, got big fast, got kneecapped by Google, Apple and Amazon and by the time they recovered had lost most of any momentum they ever had.
They even produced their own Reddit-alike, spread across several .win domains - that was a thing that happened in response to the biggest Trumper community getting banned from Reddit. That original community migrated to TheDonald.win and later rebranded as Patriots.win.
Truth Social is basically what Gab/Parler wanted to be, but big Tech doesn’t want to fight against Trump because he’s exactly the kind of petty asshole to fuck them over for considering it. Truth Social is of course Mastodon under the hood with federation disabled.
But if we presume fediverse apps are a protocol rather than a proprietary product (which is usually how they are sold to users, making analogies to things like email or the web as compared to a proprietary system) why would you need to reinvent the wheel? No one is arguing that we need an exclusively communist alternative to email or the web.
Actually truth social would be the perfect example, but again, how many people do you hear talking about how much they enjoy truth social? It’s true nobody wants to be sued by Trump, but that’s not really support as much as fear and its own form of censorship.
Truth Social is always there if you want it, but is it really censorship that keeps more people from using it or is it to some extent capitalism working?
If you have a truly free market people will just go to another platform bc there’s no reason they have to use X, or Truth Social, or Mastodon, or BlueSky unless one person (or a group of oligarchs) buys all of them and controls the market. If one of those platforms fails, can you really blame it on censorship?
Musk bought X bc he claimed he wanted to have free speech and to get rid of all the bots, but he did neither. Now that place is mainly a bot fueled echo chamber. It’s just not an enjoyable platform to use anymore, and most users have switched to an alternative like bluesky.
I personally don’t really like Bluesky either, but I know a lot of people that do. Even though it’s not a right wing platform, it’s still seems very difficult for content to actually reach people organically. The same is true with Substack, and you have even less control of the content that appears on your feed. I hate IG for that reason too (among many others).
Algorithm control and bot armies always eventually becomes a weird form of censorship. It happens on every platform (even lemmy to a lesser extent), and at a certain point it makes the platform just unusable. There are definitely accounts like that on Mastodon too, and I still use it for some things but don’t really interact much on there bc of the same reason.
It’s almost like an uncanny valley situation. Like at a certain point the bots go from a tool that helps to generate user interest and grow a platform, to just over saturating and creating dead internet vibes. Like you can tell when a narrative is being controlled or generated by a sudden swarm of users and it’s very off-putting.
Reddit has gotten so bad about this that you will have posts that just can’t be upvoted at all, with like a hilariously impossible ratio of upvotes to comments. Then those “user” recommendation posts that are clearly just advertisements are the worst. I used to rely on Reddit for advice and information on things like that bc I was talking to other humans without an agenda to sell me something. Now I usually just assume any recommendation on Reddit is an advertisement and ignore it.
Apple and Google didn’t want to lose business by associating with something the majority of people found off-putting, but is that really censorship?
Again you’re relying on an existing platform to take on supporting your messaging instead of just promoting it yourself. Couldn’t you just rely on a user base sharing a link to download an app rather than putting it in one of the stores?
But that is also why so many users or instances block instances like .grad and to a lesser extent .ml, and some people do argue they should be de-federated.
I don’t think that’s really necessary. I’m glad to have the ability to talk to and interact with people I don’t agree with on everything. There’s .ml users here that have been very helpful with things nobody else was able to help me with. (I’m actually glad we’re able to have this conversation we’re having.)
But, I’ve also been blocked from .ml communities without any warning bc I shared images of Xinnie the Pooh. So, i’m sure there are some people on the left who willingly identify as tankies, and would enjoy a completely separate dedicated safe space on the internet for communism or leftist authoritarianism. If they made one, it would very likely end up running into the same issues as Gab/Parler, but I still wouldn’t believe that censorship is to blame for its failure.
It’s just difficult to create a market for a very niche and exclusionary product that a lot of people find off-putting due to extremist content.