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Alt-Tech in a Nutshell
Nov. 17th, 2018 10:28 amIn the not-too-distant future I'll be summarizing my experiences with and overall impressions of each of the new/emerging "Alt Tech" social media and content-hosting platforms that have arisen in response to Big Tech's (Silicon Valley) ever-increasing censorship of any form of expression that doesn't bend the knee to their cultural-left ideology.
Here's but a few of the new platforms and my very basic and highly-opinionated impression of each of them:
Gab(dot)com - Gab is a Twitter clone and doesn't really pretend it's anything beyond being a "Free Speech" version of Twitter. It began as a haven for people banned from Twitter for arbitrarily-defined infractions like hate speech and harassment. The interface is slick and user-friendly, though the site itself has been buggy an unreliable since the recent attacks on them by SJW craptivists and tech infrastructure corporations (like domain registrars and hosting companies) that easily cave into pressure campaigns from the aforementioned censorship-loving puritans. Having said that, I've found the site's core user base to be pretty cancerous, as from day one it's been a safe haven for the far-right, i.e. the Alt Right: those obsessive white nationalists/identitarians and pathetic Nazi-LARPers. This is what I mean the actual far-right, not the imaginary one the mainstream media bills as anyone with a right-of-center and anti-establishment opinion. Half the posts I scroll by on Gab is an endless stream of drivel that blames "teh Jooz!" and nonwhites for every imaginable problem with Western culture today. That's not the majority of the user base however. The rest tend to be basic-bitch MAGA-populist conservative types who worship President Trump and have a worldview that is a rough mashup of watered-down libertarianism and a protestant Christian identity, i.e. typical American prole conservatism. I don't have a problem with these folk per-se, I just find them to be rather boring, vacuous and something quite obnoxious when the Buble-thumping factor is cranked to 11. It's because of this boring and annoying atmosphere, I don't really use Gab much. The cherry on top is that I pretty much despise microblogging to begin with.
Minds(dot)com - Minds presents itself as a "Free Speech" Facebook alternative, though in practice it tries to combine the functions of several different social platforms without implementing any of those functions in a way that's equal to or better than the originals. On top of that, the user interface is cluttered as hell and the feed is massively-spammy due to Minds's poorly-thought-out BOOST feature, which also happens to be its most annoying feature. Not only that but you have to pay Minds a small monthly fee to get rid of BOOSTS from random users popping up in your feed. Having laid all that out, I actually like the culture that has grown on Minds. It's more of an artistic and creative leaning user base, (i.e. the kind of people I tend to get along with) as opposed to the boring conservatives of Gab I mentioned above. If Minds is to grow and be a true replacement for any of the bigger platforms it needs to clean up its interface and functionality and start redesigning the site with the end user in mind. As it stands now, it's not a place where I can keep up with friends, due to the lack of differentiation between different user types. In other words, Minds needs to look more like Faceboook and less like a bastardization of Twitter and Youtube. I keep coming back to Minds and seeing the same old crap, despite an occasional cosmetic facelift. Finally, Minds can be a rather nice place to look at photography and art that users upload. And oh yeah, they've taken some cues from Steemit and now offer an Ethereum-based points system for content sharing.
Steemit - It's a blockchain-oriented blogging platform with some incorporated features like DTube (another alt video hosting service). I have to admit that I don't really "get" Steemit, nor the particular appeal of Steemit; it looks to me like a blogging site that tries to be a social media platform too. Most of the hot topics users write about are about tech and cryptocurrency. While I find those things interesting, they're not my core areas of interest and thus I'm not sure the kind of stuff I write about would find much of a receptive audience there. Overall, Steemit looks to me like a minimalist, less artsy, and much less annoying version of Minds. There quite an active community established there and the interface gets right to the point and is super easy to use for basic functionality like posting. But beyond that, effective use of Steemit it's quite complicated in a tech-arcane sort of way and this will serve as a deterrent to anything approaching mass-adoption. The whole thing looks like it was designed by eggheads for eggheads. Perhaps my non-egghead self will mirror this entry on Steemit and see how it goes over ;)
Bitchute - In short, a Youtube alternative. Like the others above, it's geared toward "Free Speech" and basically lets users upload whatever they want, within the limits of the law of course. It's main distinguishing feature is the way it distributes the bandwidth for each video among the users viewing the video, not so different from the way the BitTorrent protocol decentralizes bandwidth. In practice, Bitchute has become a haven for Youtube content creators who have had their videos age-restricted, demonetized and even take down, for reasons that often border on frivolous and absurd. And as of recent Bitchute had their Paypal account suspended (see: craptivist brigading), effectively cutting off their main income stream. In summary, as long as Youtube keeps censoring and harassing its creators, the more sites like Bitchute will need to exist. And hopefully these site will survive the constant attacks from the BigTech-MSM-Deepstate cabal.
MeWe - It's a true Facebook clone and looks quite nice when it comes to the site's design and features. Though I'm weary about it being a "Free Speech" platform as it seems to be run by the usual gaggle of San Francisco leftists. I've only played around with it a little and my overall impression is that it's nicely-designed social platform waiting for a user base. In other words, it's pretty dead and there's not very much engagement on user posts. Lack of engagement is effectively death for a social media platform, as without the "social" aspect there is no network or media. We'll see how this goes; my hopes for MeWe aren't too high.
Mastodon/Ostatus - This is a federated version of Twitter. Federated means the overall service is decentralized into a network of independent servers, or "instances" ... kind of like nodes in a network. Each instance can institute its own rules for its users. In a user feed using software like Mastodon, the user can either browse just the activity on their own instance or they can see the entire "Fediverse" which is the global network. Users can even block out entire instances they might deem to be objectionable for whatever reason. And instance admins can also block out other instances, as far as I know. I like the overall concept of the Fediverse and there's a chance a system like this could be the future of internet social networking. However this arrangement does tend to encourage the sort of ideological tribalism we're so used to seeing in the currentyear. Each instance can become an echo chamber for whatever the prevailing ideology that instance was formed around. And then instances which allow for controversial content are easily assigned an outcast status and mass-blocked from other instances. The Ostatus protocol seems to have taken cues from the now-moribund Diaspora project, which was an attempt to create a decentralized version of Facebook. Ostatus platforms like Mastodon might go the way of Diaspora. While the federated structure is great in theory, it does require some degree of tech literacy to navigate. In other words, such a system will probably never attract a critical mass of "normies" who seem to love those invasive, centralized platforms that make everything just so damn easy and convenient!
----
There's surely more platforms to go over, but I can't really think of any major ones at the moment, so I'll stop here. And for some of the more notable ones like Gab and Minds, I'll go into more detail on in follow-up posts at some point.
Here's but a few of the new platforms and my very basic and highly-opinionated impression of each of them:
Gab(dot)com - Gab is a Twitter clone and doesn't really pretend it's anything beyond being a "Free Speech" version of Twitter. It began as a haven for people banned from Twitter for arbitrarily-defined infractions like hate speech and harassment. The interface is slick and user-friendly, though the site itself has been buggy an unreliable since the recent attacks on them by SJW craptivists and tech infrastructure corporations (like domain registrars and hosting companies) that easily cave into pressure campaigns from the aforementioned censorship-loving puritans. Having said that, I've found the site's core user base to be pretty cancerous, as from day one it's been a safe haven for the far-right, i.e. the Alt Right: those obsessive white nationalists/identitarians and pathetic Nazi-LARPers. This is what I mean the actual far-right, not the imaginary one the mainstream media bills as anyone with a right-of-center and anti-establishment opinion. Half the posts I scroll by on Gab is an endless stream of drivel that blames "teh Jooz!" and nonwhites for every imaginable problem with Western culture today. That's not the majority of the user base however. The rest tend to be basic-bitch MAGA-populist conservative types who worship President Trump and have a worldview that is a rough mashup of watered-down libertarianism and a protestant Christian identity, i.e. typical American prole conservatism. I don't have a problem with these folk per-se, I just find them to be rather boring, vacuous and something quite obnoxious when the Buble-thumping factor is cranked to 11. It's because of this boring and annoying atmosphere, I don't really use Gab much. The cherry on top is that I pretty much despise microblogging to begin with.
Minds(dot)com - Minds presents itself as a "Free Speech" Facebook alternative, though in practice it tries to combine the functions of several different social platforms without implementing any of those functions in a way that's equal to or better than the originals. On top of that, the user interface is cluttered as hell and the feed is massively-spammy due to Minds's poorly-thought-out BOOST feature, which also happens to be its most annoying feature. Not only that but you have to pay Minds a small monthly fee to get rid of BOOSTS from random users popping up in your feed. Having laid all that out, I actually like the culture that has grown on Minds. It's more of an artistic and creative leaning user base, (i.e. the kind of people I tend to get along with) as opposed to the boring conservatives of Gab I mentioned above. If Minds is to grow and be a true replacement for any of the bigger platforms it needs to clean up its interface and functionality and start redesigning the site with the end user in mind. As it stands now, it's not a place where I can keep up with friends, due to the lack of differentiation between different user types. In other words, Minds needs to look more like Faceboook and less like a bastardization of Twitter and Youtube. I keep coming back to Minds and seeing the same old crap, despite an occasional cosmetic facelift. Finally, Minds can be a rather nice place to look at photography and art that users upload. And oh yeah, they've taken some cues from Steemit and now offer an Ethereum-based points system for content sharing.
Steemit - It's a blockchain-oriented blogging platform with some incorporated features like DTube (another alt video hosting service). I have to admit that I don't really "get" Steemit, nor the particular appeal of Steemit; it looks to me like a blogging site that tries to be a social media platform too. Most of the hot topics users write about are about tech and cryptocurrency. While I find those things interesting, they're not my core areas of interest and thus I'm not sure the kind of stuff I write about would find much of a receptive audience there. Overall, Steemit looks to me like a minimalist, less artsy, and much less annoying version of Minds. There quite an active community established there and the interface gets right to the point and is super easy to use for basic functionality like posting. But beyond that, effective use of Steemit it's quite complicated in a tech-arcane sort of way and this will serve as a deterrent to anything approaching mass-adoption. The whole thing looks like it was designed by eggheads for eggheads. Perhaps my non-egghead self will mirror this entry on Steemit and see how it goes over ;)
Bitchute - In short, a Youtube alternative. Like the others above, it's geared toward "Free Speech" and basically lets users upload whatever they want, within the limits of the law of course. It's main distinguishing feature is the way it distributes the bandwidth for each video among the users viewing the video, not so different from the way the BitTorrent protocol decentralizes bandwidth. In practice, Bitchute has become a haven for Youtube content creators who have had their videos age-restricted, demonetized and even take down, for reasons that often border on frivolous and absurd. And as of recent Bitchute had their Paypal account suspended (see: craptivist brigading), effectively cutting off their main income stream. In summary, as long as Youtube keeps censoring and harassing its creators, the more sites like Bitchute will need to exist. And hopefully these site will survive the constant attacks from the BigTech-MSM-Deepstate cabal.
MeWe - It's a true Facebook clone and looks quite nice when it comes to the site's design and features. Though I'm weary about it being a "Free Speech" platform as it seems to be run by the usual gaggle of San Francisco leftists. I've only played around with it a little and my overall impression is that it's nicely-designed social platform waiting for a user base. In other words, it's pretty dead and there's not very much engagement on user posts. Lack of engagement is effectively death for a social media platform, as without the "social" aspect there is no network or media. We'll see how this goes; my hopes for MeWe aren't too high.
Mastodon/Ostatus - This is a federated version of Twitter. Federated means the overall service is decentralized into a network of independent servers, or "instances" ... kind of like nodes in a network. Each instance can institute its own rules for its users. In a user feed using software like Mastodon, the user can either browse just the activity on their own instance or they can see the entire "Fediverse" which is the global network. Users can even block out entire instances they might deem to be objectionable for whatever reason. And instance admins can also block out other instances, as far as I know. I like the overall concept of the Fediverse and there's a chance a system like this could be the future of internet social networking. However this arrangement does tend to encourage the sort of ideological tribalism we're so used to seeing in the currentyear. Each instance can become an echo chamber for whatever the prevailing ideology that instance was formed around. And then instances which allow for controversial content are easily assigned an outcast status and mass-blocked from other instances. The Ostatus protocol seems to have taken cues from the now-moribund Diaspora project, which was an attempt to create a decentralized version of Facebook. Ostatus platforms like Mastodon might go the way of Diaspora. While the federated structure is great in theory, it does require some degree of tech literacy to navigate. In other words, such a system will probably never attract a critical mass of "normies" who seem to love those invasive, centralized platforms that make everything just so damn easy and convenient!
----
There's surely more platforms to go over, but I can't really think of any major ones at the moment, so I'll stop here. And for some of the more notable ones like Gab and Minds, I'll go into more detail on in follow-up posts at some point.
