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Comment on I loved the gab interview on timcast

I feel like by removing ActivityPub support, gab is being disingenuous about being free speech. It's like "Oh yeah, we want to let anyone talk, but not you. Just people we control."

Having lived almost exclusively on distributed platforms for a year now, the only way to be free to allow people to host and control their own communities, and not to rely on single monolithic websites to grant us freedom.

Remember that Google pretended to be interested in open protocols too before shutting the door behind them and oh by the way now you're banned for wrongthink.

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iamtanmay@wolfballs.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
I am on both sides of this. As @masterofballs@wolfballs.com aid, these technical decisions are sometimes really necessary. After 2020 election, Gab was unusable. Its running really smooth now.

If they don't prioritise opening up GAB with an alternative to ActivityPub, then you could be right, they just want to maximise their platform.

Personally I don't think its a big loss. Ever since I've been on Wolfballs, I have understood the power of the federated platform, and I think its the future. Gab as a platform isn't so relevant, I think personally.

What is truly amazing is the parallel economy stuff Gab is creating. I am waiting to sign up to GabPay, and I am hoping that it will really accelerate the splitting off from Amazon/Visa/Paypal/Google

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- sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  It's ultimately their choice, and that ability to choose is definitely part of the point of diversifying, I'll admit that. I'm also biased in part because I run all my own websites, and so interoperability means that my users and I can participate, whereas platforms that don't are just as much behind an iron curtain just the same as Facebook is.
  
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  - iamtanmay@wolfballs.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    Someone is downvoting you as soon as you post.....
    
    Anyway, I fully agree. I don't really know what Gab's roadmap is. I hope they keep developing stuff that other open sourcers/startups can use, like Gabpay.
    
    But the GAB platform is rather boring. Even if they opened up, I don't really know if many people would be interested....
    
    The only 2 notable people I know there are Donald and MTG. And frankly I stopped reading Donald's tweets on GAB, they were not inspiring.
    
    I think Donald needed the pushback from lefties on Twitter to really make his message relevant. Otherwise his words just are kind of empty on their own.
    
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    masterofballs@wolfballs.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    Donald Trump isn't on gab. Gab just mirrors his blog. I started doing that here too to c/trump.
    
    Also no one is down voting him. Federated users do not get their own upvote automatically for some reason. He's coming from a different app lotide I think and federation between the two is still a little wonky.
    
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masterofballs@wolfballs.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

I feel like by removing ActivityPub support, gab is being disingenuous about being free speech. It’s like “Oh yeah, we want to let anyone talk, but not you. Just people we control.”

I agree ActivityPub is a great way for normal people to crowd source their computing power to help fight the tyrants of silicon valley. And I plan to continue to study it and try to contribute to the ecosystem.

He explains in the interview during the Q&A the problems they had with activitypub. It had scaling problems.

Here is a video where a gab Software Engineer explains the problems they were having

What was happening IMO is people were using federation as a vector to attack Gab with denial of service attacks. People spinning up hundreds of temporary dummy mastodon nodes to overload Gab's network.

The freedom to speak and think is not going to be saved by a single solution. We need multiple approaches.

Gab is also very grandma friendly. You and I can spin up a instance, connect with different tech but grandma would just get confused.

I'm happy Andrew built a system outside of the control and influence of big tech and I hope he can inspire others to do the same.

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- goldenballs@wolfballs.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  You should avoid being too alternative, because vacating the public square allows the orcs to occupy it. Thingslike GabPay need to be as ubiquitous as possible. Channels like CNN and MSNBC and BBC and Guardian need to be proactively crushed, not ignored. You don't win a war by running away, but by choosing when and where to fight each battle. The multiple approaches idea is important because of resilience to inevitable attack and to present a large market to the "middle third" of society than you/we are fighting to recruit from the cryptofascist cult "third". Hiding in noise needs lots of voices to be the noise.
  
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