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Incorrect. > Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient".[2][3][4] Censorship can be conducted by a government[5], private institutions, and corporations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
Why aren't you quoting a real dictionary?
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 decentraliz…
Most 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.
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.
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Deciding what content is allowed on your private platform is not censorship. The platform owner is exercising their own form of speech.
Privatized censorship is legal in the US, but it is still censorship. For example, the MPAA was formed because the movie industry felt it was better to self-censor than to have the government censor them. If your movie contains anything the censors don’t approve, then it will not get an R rating, and will not be distributed to theaters, etc. They even censor political speech sometimes: https://boingboing.net/2007/12/…
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A nice thing about Mastodon/ActivityPub is that administrators of "instances" (which means basically each running copy of the server software; you create a user account with a specific Mastodon instance, rather than with Mastodon itself) can disable federation with individual other instances, if they want to. So if a particular instance becomes a haven for trolls or other miscreants, you can block that entire instanc…
Okay cool. I wonder does that mean Gab is able to use and benefit from any apps/tools created for Mastodon instances - or would it be possible for the owners of those apps/tools themselves to block/prevent certain instances from benefiting? I'd hope that's the case so everyone has the ability to 'vote' for who they are supporting.
sigh
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms: [1]
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
...
> “Moving to the ActivityPub protocol as our base allows us to get into mobile App Stores without even having to submit and get approval of our own apps, whether Apple and Google like it or not.“ The perils (or benefits?) of open protocols. Existing mastodon/pleroma clients will be able to connect to Gab by adding a server setting. Now I wonder if mastodon client app developers will start filtering the allowed server…
> Now I wonder if mastodon client app developers will start filtering the allowed servers users can put in... That's precisely what Mastodon's creator suggested earlier today: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/102184195834215862 Of course, he has no authority over mobile apps, so it remains up to app creators to decide. I believe there are three apps that share the majority of users (Fedilab, Tusky, Mast). Most popula…
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In spite of the fact that Gab is a known cess pool (cis pool?), I funded it because we need more alternatives to the big social networks. I would have funded Tor and 4chan had I the opportunity many years ago. Not too long ago this was a classical liberal position. Today free speech is passé. Guess I'm just old fashioned. I'm happy to see that Gab is switching to Mastodon. I think it will increase the survivability o…
> Not too long ago this was a classical liberal position. Today free speech is passé. Guess I'm just old fashioned. It's not old fashioned, it's just that people differentiate free speech in principle from paying the server bills. Just as freedom of the press never meant the newspaper had to publish your op-ed, free speech online doesn't mean Twitter has to give anyone server space to post Nazi stuff. (I agree that t…
True, they may not have the same reach as everybody else, but they can have their own decentralised space to air their views and build their own stuff rather than relying on the mainstream social networks, free from censorship.
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> People who want space spaces who don't think mainstream platforms moderate enough, and the alt-right and free speech crowd. I've never really understood the 'safe spaces' line of argument. I'm a 30 year old white male, and whenever I log onto YouTube I see nothing but recommendations trying to force me down the alt-right rabbit hole. Sure, Twitter has booted off a few high profile people on the alt right but I don'…
I tried Diaspora a while ago, and found the lack of "the center" very unappealing in discussions, and see some of the same today on Mastodon: People who end up on these alternate networks tend to be people who were either banned from mainstream or bullied off of them, so they tend to be the very far ends of the political spectrum on both sides. I remember when Wil Wheaton tried to join Mastodon, and some transgressio…
Also, there's no such thing as "not liberal enough". People on the far left aren't liberal — they don't believe in capitalism in the first place. Liberals are more center-left according to US standards, and center-right according to European standards. Further to the left are socialists, communists, and anarchists, not "super-liberals".
Gab solicited $5M [1] in investments just to use open source software that anyone can use for free. Wonder how those investors feel about it. [1]: https://thinkprogress.org/social-network-that-caters-to-whit...
Most HN posts: HN users hate internet controlled and censored by governments or corporations This post: HN users hate it when things they don't like manage to get around corporate and government censorship
> “Moving to the ActivityPub protocol as our base allows us to get into mobile App Stores without even having to submit and get approval of our own apps, whether Apple and Google like it or not.“ The perils (or benefits?) of open protocols. Existing mastodon/pleroma clients will be able to connect to Gab by adding a server setting. Now I wonder if mastodon client app developers will start filtering the allowed server…
While apple does have some 'technology bars' you have to clear to get into their store. You can't use private APIs in the Apple frameworks for example. There are also 'content' bars that have to be surmounted. I don't think just because they use activity pub or whatever protocol that apple is going to roll over and play nice. Their whole social network is literally a garbage fire, Apple doesn't want to associate thei…
Any of this type of client app can and will be used for the worst things in the internet. So far Apple has not tried to censor it, I’d be surprised if that changed but we will see.