[predators372]

Well, maybe it'd be wiser to start with keeping media platforms as platforms for the media rather than outlets for opinions, political or otherwise.

I remember the days when Twitter was weird and diverse and interesting. There was a group of people making *-ebooks bots for strange content, there were people walking in traphouses in major cities and basically doing photo essays. There was so much interesting, unique content on Twitter back then.

Granted, Twitter is certainly imbalanced from the political perspective and it'll be good to see a better balance, but I think that the platform will almost inevitably sway further from the coolest things that they were doing before.

I LOVE politics, but damn if it ain't ruining all kinds of cool tech.

[beamatronic]

Well there’s no moat so anyone can make a Twitter competitor

[loceng]

I'd agree with you once 100% of your data, and network connections data, is owned and movable by you - so if others move their data too, everything can be previously interlinked and displayed in a UI similarly - then we'd have true mobility and ability to "vote for governance" with our attention (so we can decide to pay for a service with ads or pay with funds).

If all of the good people from these platforms would shift away, taking away advertising revenues with them, then platforms that do bad, unacceptable things, would quickly get punished.

[0x445442]

Until the hosting provider de-platforms the competitor for differing political views. Or the competitor's payment processor de-platforms them for their political views. Unless the competitor is it's own cloud provider and it's own payment platform they're at risk.

[didericis]

I really hope we can get some more serious decentralized infrastructure mainstreamed so this sort of partisan platform stuff becomes a non issue.

Centralized, corruptible bottlenecks like political payment processors and political big cloud providers are eroding the open nature of the internet.

Although I think it’s possible to replace and/or reform some of the current sore spots, the pessimist in me is worried we have deeper social and philosophical problems that will prevent things from moving in that direction. Many people now seem to reject the very idea of apolitical utilities. They consider it immoral to allow the existence of services for people they consider to be severely harming others through their use of that infrastructure, despite the often political and highly debatable nature of that harm.

A free and open internet is built on the same philosophical principles as the first amendment. The spirit of the first amendment is something the people as a whole need to respect in order for it to work.

People forget how much religious sects hated each other when the Bill of Rights was drafted. Europe had been fighting a seemingly endless series of religious conflicts since the protestant reformation, and adherents believed allowing opposing adherents to spread their corrupting influence would literally damn the world to hell.

The first amendment was about allowing others to practice beliefs despite sincere fears that such beliefs would damn the world to hell. If we can’t allow people we consider corrupting to operate, and need to bar all of those corrupting influences from access to core utilities, we are failing to live up to the principles underlying the first amendment and risk plunging back into the kind of sectarian and philosophically based conflict the enlightenment helped us to escape from. If those we dislike and may consider evil are respecting our property rights and are not committing physical violence against us, we should be tolerant and allow them to exist and operate in society and seek to change them only through open dialog, not forceful coercion.

[heartbeats]

Not true. Cloud providers can and do get depeered for political views. So the competitor have to be their own BGP peer as well.

EDIT: Since you're downvoting me, here's one example - not strictly a cloud provider, but a DoS protection provider, but I'd still argue it counts: https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1158406276570734592

[SlowRobotAhead]

This is a bad argument. Google tried to make a Facebook competitor... google... and failed spectacularly.

If Google resources can’t overcome the momentum of a big service; then no one can except over a long time.

So while I’m very free hand of market sometimes, I realize the reality that these are currently monopolies in their spaces and have to resources to prevent competition via lawsuits and acquisitions.

[rootusrootus]

Google's attempt didn't simply fail because of network effects, though, it failed because people didn't like it. It wasn't very similar to Facebook at all.