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Those focused on Gab's audience should realize this kind of attempt is the best hope for a global migration off of twitter to a decentralized service. (Which to
by gfodor 7y ago
Those focused on Gab's audience should realize this kind of attempt is the best hope for a global migration off of twitter to a decentralized service. (Which to me, would be a good thing.)
If it was ever going to happen at this point, it would probably be by venture backed company addressing an alienated audience from the platform who is incentivized enough to switch platforms, building a good UX around a decentralized alternative, and then hoping you can get enough critical mass for network effects to kick in. In the limit, the alt-right focus of Gab will eventually dilute away if the edges of the network get built up and Gab is just another (big) node in the network -- nascent services have an audience focus to get traction that self-evidently goes away as they reach global scale. You don't have to like their choice of initial audience, but this strategic execution certainly seems one worth keeping an eye on, not just to see if the migration starts to happen at a larger scale but also because if they validate the strategy other companies can target similar niche audiences.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoMost of the Mastodon network will ban Gab immediately (and the founder of Gab acknowledges as much in the comments of the article), community dilution is very unlikely. But they will get to share federation with a variety of other alt-right and free speech zone Mastodon servers which have been banned by the larger fediverse community.
- gfodor 7y agoAs it should be -- by community dilution I was referring more to mind share around Mastodon and also the likelihood that Gab's community would soften its alt-right focus if it's able to get traction with a wider audience that may lean right but is not hard right. I think this kind of federation for under-served audiences, combined with good productization, is a necessary step towards a future where fan-out 'microblogging' has the same place in our society as email. To me, it was quite a sight to see Congress speaking to half a dozen white men about how to decide what words people can say to each other over the Internet -- the absence of a representative for regulating "email speech" made it clear the importance of decentralizing these services.
- not_a_cop75 7y agoIt's hard to really claim Gab is alt-right when the truth is really more that it's alt anything. Remember the good old days of usenet, where alt represented all the usenet "channels" that basically didn't give a damn and weren't sponsored by anyone in particular? Sure you had your flame wars, but back then no one got banned for it. The advantage of services like Twitter is that whatever agenda Twitter wants to control, they control. The ability to control the narrative is certainly a profitable one. What was the quote? When the service is free, you're the product. Think on that.
- jakelazaroff 7y agoIs it just a coincidence, then, that every time I refreshed this article, literally every single user listed under "who to follow" was alt-right, a white supremacist or a Nazi? Or that the company itself has repeatedly made anti-Semitic statements? Or that there are photographs of the founder making white supremacist hand signs?
- egypturnash 7y agoShit, I pre-emptively banned gab.com and gab.ai on my Mastodon instance and they ain't even up yet.
- kgraves 7y agoPrecisely, to me this is a big experiment in decentralised networks. Like Gab or not, this is an interesting observation.
- tw04 7y ago>You don't have to like their choice of initial audience And what exactly leads you to believe that gab is going to somehow morph into a site for anything other than their "initial audience"? Why would "normal" folks actively seek out and participate in a forum full of racist, radical white supremacists?