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That ends in a cesspool that nobody is willing to spend money on or do business with. See Voat.

• iamstupidsimple 5y ago
  It worked fine in the past when the mainstream platforms were also free speech platforms. Scale matters and those websites are only terrible because they're bastions for everybody else who also got banned.
• nyolfen 5y ago
  voat is a forum, podcast platforms are passive and do not have any kind of direct social interaction. 'free speech until the law is broken' is what appx the entire internet was like until ~6 years ago.
• atrus 5y ago
  No, Voat was a cesspool, because Reddit really only pissed of the "unreasonable" people, who all went to Voat, and unsurprisingly made it a cesspool.
• d110af5ccf 5y ago
  > That ends in a cesspool that nobody is willing to spend money on or do business with. That's not quite right. Voat was populated by the fringe that was evicted from other more mainstream platforms, Reddit in particular. So the primary demographic of their userbase is "people whose content isn't allowed on Reddit". Which given that Reddit is fairly permissive compared with many places results in an incredibly skewed userbase. Without a compelling reason for users that are more mainstream to switch I think this result is unsurprising. The "free speech" side of fedi suffers from this dynamic as well. There's a growing contingent that's there simply because they were removed from Twitter. This is all a great example of why deplatforming doesn't work at all. In seeking to silence various groups they instead get concentrated in specific locations which results in a greater degree of polarization.