While I'm bitter-tweeting: one thing nobody will state clearly about all the social-media agita is that an aspiring social-media site really only needs to attract the left (broadly speaking). Why? Because reactionaries are fundamentally parasitic -- they follow the left around.
This is what Gabber & Parler & Truth Social etc. are missing: reactionaries have no desire to gather & simply rant at one another. No one wants to hang around in that environment, not even the reactionaries themselves.
But if you build a social media site for educated city-dwelling liberal elites, the reactionaries will 100% trail along & show up. Their raison d'être is "owning the libs." They will go wherever the libs go, envy & resent whatever the libs have. It's a parasitic worldview.
Thing is, if libs could go to some magic country without reactionaries, they'd never think about reactionaries again. But reactionaries are bereft without libs -- it's right there in the name. They cannot be generative, cannot build. They can only resent & tear down.
This is what "free speech" means in reactionary hands: "wherever you libs go, whatever you're doing, you have to let us come there & shit on it. If you try to avoid us or build something without us, it violates our rights." The demand is not for speech but for *attention*.
@drvolts some of the reasons I'm cautiously optimistic/hopeful about this platform:
- no incentive to generate traffic/eyeballs with outrage;
- no incentive to bend the rules for popular users;
- no incentive to promulgate trash from garbage instances;
all of which come down to lack of capitalist pressure to grow/pay off investors/etc. We all know what the stakes are and what the enemy is like, and we're all able to work together to keep them silenced and marginal.
