[KirinDave]

Gab bans people openly and credulously discussing marxism. I have experimented with and experienced this directly. So, it fails my litmus test for "an uncensored platform."

And it's a bit comical, because Gab as a community experience is much smaller (in my perspective) from even weird sites like minds or funky social blockchain plays. Why they felt the need to ban discusions of marxism or a general strike is beyond me.

[oehpr]

Fair. By my own admission, I don't know much about gab.

I think the first time I ever heard about it was when Firefox banned Dissenter from their addons. Dissenter to me was a genius idea that has an ugly userbase. I'd love to have a version of Dissenter that isn't populated entirely by bigots.

I think the idea of Dissenter really has some value, you walk along the web for all sorts of reasons, and then up in the corner in your toolbar you see "oh, someone from my community has said something about this". Rather than the social network taking you to a site, the site takes you to the network.

[input_sh]

That by itself implies that every URL you visit has to be looked up to see if there's a related discussion.

No way I'd trust any add-on/startup/mega corp to do that. I barely trust Mozilla to keep my history on their servers, and that's only because they only keep the last few months and purge older data.

[commoner]

Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted, so Mozilla is not able to access your Firefox history.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/

[oehpr]

nope, you'd simply distribute a bloom filter to everyone, and then you could transmit hashed urls.

you could easily make this privacy safe.

[KirinDave]

This wouldn't address a lot of metadata-related privacy concerns.

[musingsole]

How would it not?

[KirinDave]

Because you'd still know everyone who went to a specific site because they'd be sending you unique hash. Even if you ignore that, you'd know what clusters of people all use the same sites, how often and when.

[bjl]

> Why they felt the need to ban discusions of marxism or a general strike is beyond me.

Because it was built to be a fascist recruitment channel, and the talk of 'free speech' is just a smoke screen that they don't care about at all.

[KirinDave]

Sure, but anyone who talks about that there is a punching bag. It's all awful people. They don't need to do that work, the users do it for them.

[salawat]

Likely because the intended audience is not people who see it as a viable alternative or something worth even entertaining. The irony of the situation being someone took the time to make their own platform for like minded individuals, and people in other spaces who've been known to tow the "you're free to make your own platform" line get extraordinarily bent out of sort when people actusally go and do just that.

The hilarious part being that by having the censorship in the first place and not just letting folks work it out amongst themselves, you just increase the echo chamber factor, which at some point, you have to come to terms with in real life on the basis these people exist in the real world. The very act of technically enforced societal marginalization in and of itself is an "extremism" amplifier/polarization catalyst. What confuses me is why I feel like I'm the only one who regularly brings it up. It's not that hard of a realization to reach From first principles. Especially if you spent any time in your life as a social misfit.

[KirinDave]

Well, you don't see me make fun of Parler as much because they're honest about their intentions. Gab originally claimed they were about "freedom" so it seems pretty fair to me to call them out on moderation that is clearly political.

[gre]

You can discuss marxism and general strikes on the lemmy instance https://chapo.chat

[KirinDave]

Haha, as a certified fan of the Wrecker call-out of Chapo I doubt I'll last long there.