David Bond @DavidBond@social.cleverlibre.org

My sister is very concerned with me being on Gab...

We had a discussion about it over the weekend and she is nervous about me signing up to a site that - according to Wikipedia - "has been widely described as a "safe haven" for extremists including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the alt-right."

Let me be clear, I'm NOT saying that I support hate speech, Neo-Nazis, white supremacists and the alt-right. (I'm not even clear on what some of those terms mean).

To me, signing up to Gab is about planting a flag in another social network to demonstrate to the major platforms that I don't support their largely arbitrary censorship rules.

In the course of defending my position on free speech with my family over the weekend, I've realised that the big issue I see is that the large majority of the discourse that happens online is controlled by a few big companies (Facebook, Twitter, etc).

These companies are set up for profit and so of course, they are going to do what's best for business. They are not primarily concerned with making sure the right content is censored or allowed.

I don't think that the people that run these companies necessarily have the wrong intention. The problem I see is that speech shouldn't be controlled by such a small number of companies

The future? Maybe it's decentralised social media.

In real life, there are certain things you wouldn't talk about at work and certain things you would or wouldn't talk about with your family.

I think that this is probably the best way to control speech. To decide within smaller groups what is and isn't acceptable in that context.

I haven't looked too much into it but perhaps decentralised social media or at least, having a distribution of discourse happening across multiple platforms (rather than just a few) will provide a better balance of freedom and safety for all.

Thoughts?

How #Mastodon users look when they talk about #Gab users.

So I made a bot that posts my friend @Hero7Dave 's tweets on gab and it its working. I want to freak him out and show him later but it would be funny if his gab posts had lots of comments and like.

"Dude look at this account on gab!! WTF"

Everyone help me out 😉🤣 -> ⚡@Hero7Dave 🤣

I saw this on the streets of #HongKong

Please let folks in #HongKong know about all the Free Software and Decentralised tools that they can use.

If you are on Twitter and Facebook, provide this information to the people who are unaware of the Free replacements.

This goes for anyone really, even the Yellow Vests in #France.

blocking and reporting gab scum on sight for fun and profit