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Gab bans people openly and credulously discussing marxism. I have experimented with and experienced this directly. So, it fails my litmus test for "an uncensore

Gab bans people openly and credulously discussing marxism. I have experimented with and experienced this directly. So, it fails my litmus test for "an uncensored platform." And it's a bit comical, because Gab as a community experience is much smaller (in my perspective) from even weird sites like minds or funky social blockchain plays. Why they felt the need to ban discusions of marxism or a general strike is beyond me.

oehpr 6y ago
Fair. By my own admission, I don't know much about gab. I think the first time I ever heard about it was when Firefox banned Dissenter from their addons. Dissenter to me was a genius idea that has an ugly userbase. I'd love to have a version of Dissenter that isn't populated entirely by bigots. I think the idea of Dissenter really has some value, you walk along the web for all sorts of reasons, and then up in the corner in your toolbar you see "oh, someone from my community has said something about this". Rather than the social network taking you to a site, the site takes you to the network.
- input_sh 6y ago
  That by itself implies that every URL you visit has to be looked up to see if there's a related discussion. No way I'd trust any add-on/startup/mega corp to do that. I barely trust Mozilla to keep my history on their servers, and that's only because they only keep the last few months and purge older data.
  - oehpr 6y ago
    nope, you'd simply distribute a bloom filter to everyone, and then you could transmit hashed urls. you could easily make this privacy safe.
    - KirinDave 6y ago
      This wouldn't address a lot of metadata-related privacy concerns.
      - musingsole 6y ago
        How would it not?
        KirinDave 6y ago
        Because you'd still know everyone who went to a specific site because they'd be sending you unique hash. Even if you ignore that, you'd know what clusters of people all use the same sites, how often and when.
        oehpr 6y ago
        That was the intent of the bloom filter. Configured properly it would actively filter out the need to endlessly send the server requests like "Hey, have anything for this hash?" However I suppose that if the site does have comments, then you do have to make requests to the server to get them... Still, I believe you're being overly pessimistic here. I think there may be some solutions to this. Maybe not perfect, but better. Lets say our social network "Ascenter" has become corrupt and is looking blackmail its participants. What about this?: The design currently requires you to send a sha(URL+salt) to the server to look up comments. This prevents Ascenter from directly knowing what site the comments refer to, but the comments themselves will be a big clue. What if to look at the comments you have to decrypt them using sha(URL+salt2)? Ascenter will have no means to derive this key, it will only be able to determine how many comments have being placed and how large they are. That improves things a bit... But Ascenter might be able to crawl the web to discover conversations. Particularly for salacious sites if it's looking for blackmail. So... What if the salts are the answer to that? If you had your own set of salts you could use them to create your own private groups, Ascenter would have no way to access that conversation. Or even figure out that they have occurred. With the presence of public and private salts, what if the browser plugin itself could be configured with a blacklist of sites not to send requests for? You could still have private channel comments, but not public. I could see the community per-generating a black list... One last note I'd end on here is that the level of trust we are expecting right now is a huge bar lower than the level of trust we give general social networks Consider what HackerNews could do if it went rogue like like Ascenter? To blackmail you all they would need to do is go to one of your old comments, rewrite it as something salacious, then blackmail you with it. Comments on HackerNews arn't signed, and arn't encrypted. We're quite vulnerable to them. edit: sorry for the long post. This was a bit of a stream of consciousness. TL;DR: The bloom filter limits the risk, and I think there are cryptographic solutions that reduce the level of user exposure to below that of current social networks.
  - commoner 6y ago
    Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted, so Mozilla is not able to access your Firefox history. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/
gre 6y ago
You can discuss marxism and general strikes on the lemmy instance https://chapo.chat https://chapo.chat
- KirinDave 6y ago
  Haha, as a certified fan of the Wrecker call-out of Chapo I doubt I'll last long there.
bjl 6y ago
> Why they felt the need to ban discusions of marxism or a general strike is beyond me. Because it was built to be a fascist recruitment channel, and the talk of 'free speech' is just a smoke screen that they don't care about at all.
- KirinDave 6y ago
  Sure, but anyone who talks about that there is a punching bag. It's all awful people. They don't need to do that work, the users do it for them.
Proven 6y ago
> Gab bans people openly and credulously discussing marxism. I have experimented with and experienced this directly. I find that extremely hard to believe. It is also inaccurate, because Gab lets you connect to any community. What you're saying they banned you from theirs. As for being in favor of a ban on Gab's own app (other comments): any app can acess Gab's instance, and Gab's own app lets users access any instance including Gab's own so a ban on Gab's app doesn't work, you annoying busybodies.
salawat 6y ago
Likely because the intended audience is not people who see it as a viable alternative or something worth even entertaining. The irony of the situation being someone took the time to make their own platform for like minded individuals, and people in other spaces who've been known to tow the "you're free to make your own platform" line get extraordinarily bent out of sort when people actusally go and do just that. The hilarious part being that by having the censorship in the first place and not just letting folks work it out amongst themselves, you just increase the echo chamber factor, which at some point, you have to come to terms with in real life on the basis these people exist in the real world. The very act of technically enforced societal marginalization in and of itself is an "extremism" amplifier/polarization catalyst. What confuses me is why I feel like I'm the only one who regularly brings it up. It's not that hard of a realization to reach From first principles. Especially if you spent any time in your life as a social misfit.
- KirinDave 6y ago
  Well, you don't see me make fun of Parler as much because they're honest about their intentions. Gab originally claimed they were about "freedom" so it seems pretty fair to me to call them out on moderation that is clearly political.

oehpr 6y ago

Fair. By my own admission, I don't know much about gab. I think the first time I ever heard about it was when Firefox banned Dissenter from their addons. Dissenter to me was a genius idea that has an ugly userbase. I'd love to have a version of Dissenter that isn't populated entirely by bigots. I think the idea of Dissenter really has some value, you walk along the web for all sorts of reasons, and then up in the corner in your toolbar you see "oh, someone from my community has said something about this". Rather than the social network taking you to a site, the site takes you to the network.

input_sh 6y ago
That by itself implies that every URL you visit has to be looked up to see if there's a related discussion. No way I'd trust any add-on/startup/mega corp to do that. I barely trust Mozilla to keep my history on their servers, and that's only because they only keep the last few months and purge older data.
- oehpr 6y ago
  nope, you'd simply distribute a bloom filter to everyone, and then you could transmit hashed urls. you could easily make this privacy safe.
  - KirinDave 6y ago
    This wouldn't address a lot of metadata-related privacy concerns.
    - musingsole 6y ago
      How would it not?
      - KirinDave 6y ago
        Because you'd still know everyone who went to a specific site because they'd be sending you unique hash. Even if you ignore that, you'd know what clusters of people all use the same sites, how often and when.
        oehpr 6y ago
        That was the intent of the bloom filter. Configured properly it would actively filter out the need to endlessly send the server requests like "Hey, have anything for this hash?" However I suppose that if the site does have comments, then you do have to make requests to the server to get them... Still, I believe you're being overly pessimistic here. I think there may be some solutions to this. Maybe not perfect, but better. Lets say our social network "Ascenter" has become corrupt and is looking blackmail its participants. What about this?: The design currently requires you to send a sha(URL+salt) to the server to look up comments. This prevents Ascenter from directly knowing what site the comments refer to, but the comments themselves will be a big clue. What if to look at the comments you have to decrypt them using sha(URL+salt2)? Ascenter will have no means to derive this key, it will only be able to determine how many comments have being placed and how large they are. That improves things a bit... But Ascenter might be able to crawl the web to discover conversations. Particularly for salacious sites if it's looking for blackmail. So... What if the salts are the answer to that? If you had your own set of salts you could use them to create your own private groups, Ascenter would have no way to access that conversation. Or even figure out that they have occurred. With the presence of public and private salts, what if the browser plugin itself could be configured with a blacklist of sites not to send requests for? You could still have private channel comments, but not public. I could see the community per-generating a black list... One last note I'd end on here is that the level of trust we are expecting right now is a huge bar lower than the level of trust we give general social networks Consider what HackerNews could do if it went rogue like like Ascenter? To blackmail you all they would need to do is go to one of your old comments, rewrite it as something salacious, then blackmail you with it. Comments on HackerNews arn't signed, and arn't encrypted. We're quite vulnerable to them. edit: sorry for the long post. This was a bit of a stream of consciousness. TL;DR: The bloom filter limits the risk, and I think there are cryptographic solutions that reduce the level of user exposure to below that of current social networks.
- commoner 6y ago
  Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted, so Mozilla is not able to access your Firefox history. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/

gre 6y ago

You can discuss marxism and general strikes on the lemmy instance https://chapo.chat https://chapo.chat

KirinDave 6y ago
Haha, as a certified fan of the Wrecker call-out of Chapo I doubt I'll last long there.

bjl 6y ago

> Why they felt the need to ban discusions of marxism or a general strike is beyond me. Because it was built to be a fascist recruitment channel, and the talk of 'free speech' is just a smoke screen that they don't care about at all.

KirinDave 6y ago
Sure, but anyone who talks about that there is a punching bag. It's all awful people. They don't need to do that work, the users do it for them.

Proven 6y ago

> Gab bans people openly and credulously discussing marxism. I have experimented with and experienced this directly. I find that extremely hard to believe. It is also inaccurate, because Gab lets you connect to any community. What you're saying they banned you from theirs. As for being in favor of a ban on Gab's own app (other comments): any app can acess Gab's instance, and Gab's own app lets users access any instance including Gab's own so a ban on Gab's app doesn't work, you annoying busybodies.

salawat 6y ago

Likely because the intended audience is not people who see it as a viable alternative or something worth even entertaining. The irony of the situation being someone took the time to make their own platform for like minded individuals, and people in other spaces who've been known to tow the "you're free to make your own platform" line get extraordinarily bent out of sort when people actusally go and do just that. The hilarious part being that by having the censorship in the first place and not just letting folks work it out amongst themselves, you just increase the echo chamber factor, which at some point, you have to come to terms with in real life on the basis these people exist in the real world. The very act of technically enforced societal marginalization in and of itself is an "extremism" amplifier/polarization catalyst. What confuses me is why I feel like I'm the only one who regularly brings it up. It's not that hard of a realization to reach From first principles. Especially if you spent any time in your life as a social misfit.

KirinDave 6y ago
Well, you don't see me make fun of Parler as much because they're honest about their intentions. Gab originally claimed they were about "freedom" so it seems pretty fair to me to call them out on moderation that is clearly political.