I actually got banned from this community on my old lemm.ee account under the same username. So I don’t make actual posts here. Idk if I’m even technically supposed to be commenting, so 🤫
Even so, Lemmy is nothing like what Reddit has become. Any platform is susceptible, but Reddit is now controlled by people who are out to prove a Fred Phelps like point about free speech. If you can’t say whatever you want, whenever you want, to anyone you want, go out of your way to ruin it for everybody and die miserable and alone.
Even if that does end up happening here, somebody else will just build back something new and a little better to replace it.
Fascists complained for decades about being censored on the internet and in that time what did they actually do? Did they actually build their own alternatives that anybody wanted to use, or did they just scheme and claw their way to the top to take over what somebody else made and force what they wanted on to everyone?
It’s true, they’ve basically made just about every popular internet platform unuseable in like 9 months, but that has also driven more people to just seek alternatives, and other people to focus on building them or making what already exists more user friendly. So when people just stop using that garbage, what happens to all those paid sponsors? Do they just keep paying to advertise to no one?
The dead internet theory just kind of assumes that people will want to keep using these platforms to witness bots argue instead of interacting with other people, but I can’t even really scroll through Reddit or Substack anymore bc I know there’s better content somewhere else that isn’t being controlled to keep a narrative going.
I tried to look for a very specific topic on YouTube yesterday, and got so frustrated with only having an endless stream of short clips of influencers instead of the one thing that I actually wanted, that I ended up just making an account on peertube. There’s not much content on there (yet), but the small amount that is there is sooo much more interesting than 99% of the garbage being force fed by YouTube.
I’m pretty sure that’s actually how capitalism is supposed to work when a “free market” isn’t being completely controlled by oligarchs. Like if this product sucks, and this other product is available and better, why would I keep using the shitty product unless somebody is tightly controlling the market and not allowing any competition?
I was talking to somebody yesterday about how being forced to switch to open source platforms has actually made me somewhat more optimistic for the future in general. Once somebody destroys something you love, it’s just gone. It sucks, but there’s a good chance you’ll probably never get back what was destroyed. You can’t go home again, but you can always try to rebuild something new, and make it a little better than before.
Did they actually build their own alternatives that anybody wanted to use,
Right wingers functionally excluded from major platforms more or less until Musk bought Twitter actually did create their own spaces. Several of which got made functionally inaccessible from mobile devices, or removed from search engines or otherwise actively prevented from growing organically, many of them eventually being quietly put back after any buzz around them had died down. Think Gab, Parler, various .win sites that are reddit-like, etc.
Hell, at one point the largest Mastodon instance was literally one such space that had had it’s own app banned from the app stores for being an uncensored far right space, and then several of the major general Mastodon clients made their clients refuse to connect to that specific instance at the client level as well. If you’ve ever seen a Mastodon client on say the Play store with negative reviews saying that it couldn’t connect to the largest instance, that’s because at the time the largest Mastodon instance was technically Gab.
But that’s not really creating anything new. Why did nobody just make an exclusively right wing alternative to mastodon? Idk anything about Parler, but it just seems like it’s easy to just try to make a space on an existing platform, but if you join something that was built by somebody else, you’re being provided a space within what they built.
If the right feels like they don’t want to be restricted whatsoever by the requirements of being part of a platform or institution, why has nobody really built a right wing alternative from the ground up?
Most of Project 2025 is based on Paul Weyrich deciding that the U.S. is beyond redemption in his opinion, and he says that the path forward for the right should be the homeschool model and for the right to create their own institutions.
But that’s not what’s actually happening. They’re not building any new institutions and offering them as an alternative open to anyone on the right that wants to join. They’re just taking over existing institutions, and turning them into what they wanted. It’s like they’re doing this only to prove a point that what they want should be the way that everyone lives their lives, and since society didn’t want that, they’re going to have to force it on society.
If the entire basis of your movement is that society should be focused on and built around a very narrow section of all of society, why would it be surprising that the majority of society wouldn’t want to willingly be part of your movement since they don’t fit into it?
This is like if some people that were obsessed with frisbee golf got mad bc other sports exist, so they took over every football stadium to try and force every football fan to become a fan of Frolf.
Realistically what would happen? Everybody suddenly accepts that frolf is the new football because a small group of people wanted it and now it’s your only option? Even if they can somehow hold on to power indefinitely, and keep all those football stadiums frolf only, would people really just stop playing football or would they just go literally anywhere else and play there instead? Even if it meant you might just have to start out playing in an empty field or parking lot somewhere with only a few other people, and slowly grow from there. People will just make new football stadiums or soccer stadiums or tennis courts bc not everybody wants to be forced to just play frolf.
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.
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?
Truth Social wasn’t subject to the same pressures and attacks, largely out of fear of Trump. It’s mostly Trump and his fans that are why anyone cares, but most of the sorts attracted to a site like that came rushing back to X post-Elon.
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?
There isn’t, outside of network effects. But the ones being barred from Apple devices, and only able to be sideloaded on Android (at least until Google removes that feature, which they’ve announced is coming) aren’t operating on the same footing as the others, and not because of a failure to draw an audience, but by being restricted by, well, a bunch of oligarchs…
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.
The range of rhetoric that won’t get you banned from the site has certainly expanded, even if most of what is actually there is deceptive bullshit. Probably 1 in 10 current Xitter users would be banned for saying unacceptable things under pre-Musk Twitter.
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?
Tech oligarchs cut a competitor to other tech oligarchs off at the knees to control the span and spread of online discourse - this is the kind of thing that supporting feels like supporting the face eating leopard party.
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?
Build your own entire tech stack from the hardware up, got it. Those leopards do seem hungry for faces though.
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.)
I find a certain irony here, given the instance you come from and the instance I come from. Yours has defederated from ~95 other instances, including some for being too left and some for being too right. Mine has only defederated from one, an instance essentially abandoned by it’s admins that was posting spam and actual csam.
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.
Far left fediverse instances exist, and can moderate as strictly or not as they please. No third party is actively preventing you from connecting to one with an appropriate client, including client devs. Let alone tech oligarchs cutting them off from major platforms entirely.
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.
Yet, their problem wasn’t not being able to get members organically. Gab was doing pretty well until it got big enough to be noticed and it was forcibly cut off from the mobile market by Google and Apple, migrated their backend to Mastodon as a way around that, and then had Mastodon client devs block them at the client level. At the time of migration, they were the largest Mastodon instance, so it wasn’t a matter of lack of interest. That’s kinda my point - the barriers they faced aren’t organic or a lack of interest but coordinated moves against them.
I actually got banned from this community on my old lemm.ee account under the same username. So I don’t make actual posts here. Idk if I’m even technically supposed to be commenting, so 🤫
Even so, Lemmy is nothing like what Reddit has become. Any platform is susceptible, but Reddit is now controlled by people who are out to prove a Fred Phelps like point about free speech. If you can’t say whatever you want, whenever you want, to anyone you want, go out of your way to ruin it for everybody and die miserable and alone.
Even if that does end up happening here, somebody else will just build back something new and a little better to replace it.
Fascists complained for decades about being censored on the internet and in that time what did they actually do? Did they actually build their own alternatives that anybody wanted to use, or did they just scheme and claw their way to the top to take over what somebody else made and force what they wanted on to everyone?
It’s true, they’ve basically made just about every popular internet platform unuseable in like 9 months, but that has also driven more people to just seek alternatives, and other people to focus on building them or making what already exists more user friendly. So when people just stop using that garbage, what happens to all those paid sponsors? Do they just keep paying to advertise to no one?
The dead internet theory just kind of assumes that people will want to keep using these platforms to witness bots argue instead of interacting with other people, but I can’t even really scroll through Reddit or Substack anymore bc I know there’s better content somewhere else that isn’t being controlled to keep a narrative going.
I tried to look for a very specific topic on YouTube yesterday, and got so frustrated with only having an endless stream of short clips of influencers instead of the one thing that I actually wanted, that I ended up just making an account on peertube. There’s not much content on there (yet), but the small amount that is there is sooo much more interesting than 99% of the garbage being force fed by YouTube.
I’m pretty sure that’s actually how capitalism is supposed to work when a “free market” isn’t being completely controlled by oligarchs. Like if this product sucks, and this other product is available and better, why would I keep using the shitty product unless somebody is tightly controlling the market and not allowing any competition?
I was talking to somebody yesterday about how being forced to switch to open source platforms has actually made me somewhat more optimistic for the future in general. Once somebody destroys something you love, it’s just gone. It sucks, but there’s a good chance you’ll probably never get back what was destroyed. You can’t go home again, but you can always try to rebuild something new, and make it a little better than before.
Right wingers functionally excluded from major platforms more or less until Musk bought Twitter actually did create their own spaces. Several of which got made functionally inaccessible from mobile devices, or removed from search engines or otherwise actively prevented from growing organically, many of them eventually being quietly put back after any buzz around them had died down. Think Gab, Parler, various .win sites that are reddit-like, etc.
Hell, at one point the largest Mastodon instance was literally one such space that had had it’s own app banned from the app stores for being an uncensored far right space, and then several of the major general Mastodon clients made their clients refuse to connect to that specific instance at the client level as well. If you’ve ever seen a Mastodon client on say the Play store with negative reviews saying that it couldn’t connect to the largest instance, that’s because at the time the largest Mastodon instance was technically Gab.
But that’s not really creating anything new. Why did nobody just make an exclusively right wing alternative to mastodon? Idk anything about Parler, but it just seems like it’s easy to just try to make a space on an existing platform, but if you join something that was built by somebody else, you’re being provided a space within what they built.
If the right feels like they don’t want to be restricted whatsoever by the requirements of being part of a platform or institution, why has nobody really built a right wing alternative from the ground up?
Most of Project 2025 is based on Paul Weyrich deciding that the U.S. is beyond redemption in his opinion, and he says that the path forward for the right should be the homeschool model and for the right to create their own institutions.
But that’s not what’s actually happening. They’re not building any new institutions and offering them as an alternative open to anyone on the right that wants to join. They’re just taking over existing institutions, and turning them into what they wanted. It’s like they’re doing this only to prove a point that what they want should be the way that everyone lives their lives, and since society didn’t want that, they’re going to have to force it on society.
If the entire basis of your movement is that society should be focused on and built around a very narrow section of all of society, why would it be surprising that the majority of society wouldn’t want to willingly be part of your movement since they don’t fit into it?
This is like if some people that were obsessed with frisbee golf got mad bc other sports exist, so they took over every football stadium to try and force every football fan to become a fan of Frolf.
Realistically what would happen? Everybody suddenly accepts that frolf is the new football because a small group of people wanted it and now it’s your only option? Even if they can somehow hold on to power indefinitely, and keep all those football stadiums frolf only, would people really just stop playing football or would they just go literally anywhere else and play there instead? Even if it meant you might just have to start out playing in an empty field or parking lot somewhere with only a few other people, and slowly grow from there. People will just make new football stadiums or soccer stadiums or tennis courts bc not everybody wants to be forced to just play frolf.
…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.
Truth Social wasn’t subject to the same pressures and attacks, largely out of fear of Trump. It’s mostly Trump and his fans that are why anyone cares, but most of the sorts attracted to a site like that came rushing back to X post-Elon.
There isn’t, outside of network effects. But the ones being barred from Apple devices, and only able to be sideloaded on Android (at least until Google removes that feature, which they’ve announced is coming) aren’t operating on the same footing as the others, and not because of a failure to draw an audience, but by being restricted by, well, a bunch of oligarchs…
The range of rhetoric that won’t get you banned from the site has certainly expanded, even if most of what is actually there is deceptive bullshit. Probably 1 in 10 current Xitter users would be banned for saying unacceptable things under pre-Musk Twitter.
Tech oligarchs cut a competitor to other tech oligarchs off at the knees to control the span and spread of online discourse - this is the kind of thing that supporting feels like supporting the face eating leopard party.
Build your own entire tech stack from the hardware up, got it. Those leopards do seem hungry for faces though.
I find a certain irony here, given the instance you come from and the instance I come from. Yours has defederated from ~95 other instances, including some for being too left and some for being too right. Mine has only defederated from one, an instance essentially abandoned by it’s admins that was posting spam and actual csam.
Far left fediverse instances exist, and can moderate as strictly or not as they please. No third party is actively preventing you from connecting to one with an appropriate client, including client devs. Let alone tech oligarchs cutting them off from major platforms entirely.
Yet, their problem wasn’t not being able to get members organically. Gab was doing pretty well until it got big enough to be noticed and it was forcibly cut off from the mobile market by Google and Apple, migrated their backend to Mastodon as a way around that, and then had Mastodon client devs block them at the client level. At the time of migration, they were the largest Mastodon instance, so it wasn’t a matter of lack of interest. That’s kinda my point - the barriers they faced aren’t organic or a lack of interest but coordinated moves against them.