Scuttlebutt wasn't built by "Silicon Valley hackers", but people from New Zealand, Sweden etc.

Unrelated to who builds it, decentralized or self-hosted platforms have been the go-to place for lots of extremist groups, even before MAGA, so not sure what this comment is supposed to bring to light?

A lot of Silicon Valley hackers worked on it

Who? I can't think of a single core contributor who lives in California.

The vast majority don't even live in the US. I think I'm the closest to SV and I'm in Portland.

I'm not sure that your living in Portland entirely disproves my underlying point :-)

> built by Silicon Valley hackers

No, it's not.

> a lot of Silicon Valley hackers have worked on it

No, they haven't.

> well Portland is basically SV

No, it isn't. Just do your research and nobody will correct you.

EDIT: If you'd like, maybe you could clarify your "underlying point" or which "idealistic Silicon Valley hacker" traits you mean to highlight. Nazis have been trying to weaponize Scuttlebutt for years, so I don't get why it's "funny" that MAGA chuds are trying to join now. They aren't welcome.

Please don't troll like this. It only makes the threads worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: while I have you, can you please omit swipes like the first part of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25715498, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25717995? I agree with you about Nietzsche and appreciate the knowledge that you're bringing to such discussions, but if you mix garden-variety internet dross in with it, you're contributing to destroying the commons here. It's really fragile, and we need people to be conscious about taking care of it. I'm sure you wouldn't litter in a city park or drop lit matches in a dry forest, so please don't do the equivalent here.

Thank you for your comments. I’ll try to improve!

> I had no underlying point.

Or any underlying facts. You're just posting whatever pops into your head.

> [...] furious [...]

Just because someone is saying you're wrong doesn't mean they're furious. I hope you can have some healthier interactions in the future, truly.

You can't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, or how provocative their comments. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules. I had to warn you about this just a couple days ago. Your good comments are good, but bad comments do more damage. Please take care of this.

Sorry dang.

Should I just flag posts when people are pushing misinformation? It feels wrong to call in an authority to delete their post instead of dealing with it directly, but it seems like directly confronting people leads to the above.

Appreciated! Well, it's always possible to correct bad information by respectfully providing good information, without breaking the site guidelines. That's what other users are doing (some of them at least!). I'd say flagging is best reserved for when the comment you're flagging has broken the site guidelines itself (which was the case here, but isn't always).

I think a lot of the dweb people first got interested in this area because they were on BBSes and so on sharing stuff like the anarchist's cookbook at risk of getting a visit by the FBI and used to think information wanted to be free.

Now they're adults, and have kept their interest in dweb technologies, but have come to see "dangerous speech" as a huge problem, and are waking up to the realization that their technical interests and goals would enable these kinds of things. And they're not happy about it, or at the very least are experiencing cognitive dissonance. But that was always the case, and for many, they were the unsavory people in their youth that the older folks were saying were participating in dangerous rhetoric and ought to be silenced or investigated, just like they are saying now about people who are saying things adjacent to things which are illegal.

At the very least we should seek consistency. If you support decentralized technology for speech, you should be happy with the net benefits and net harms. The alternative is the status quo. Arguably the spirit of the internet was not to have what we have now.

I agree with your first paragraph but not the rest. We still feel information should be free and decentralized technology is the future.

I'm not saying all dweb people feel this way, I'm in the other camp myself. I'm saying part of the dynamic going on includes a subset of people who forgot that these aren't some global good, they will create both good and harm, like anything else.

I agree that the BBS tradition of G-files plays into this, but those were very different times. The people downloading this sort of stuff were almost exclusively kids who got a thrill out of possessing forbidden knowledge, but aside from setting off a smoke bomb at an abandoned quarry or something, nothing ever came of it. The near mainstream culture of prepping and guns and conspiracy is far different than it was back then.

I still think that there is a positive place for DWeb technologies, but that place is specifically to enable more truly free speech. A lot of what got us into this mess is that speech on social media is not truly free. The only speech that is allowed/promoted on those platforms is that which appeals to base instincts, because it is that speech that drives revenue for the platforms. What we're allowed to say, and have heard, should not depend on what is most profitable for a few companies.

The problem with your first point is that however true it may be, it doesn’t provide a good mental framework for creating values that are universally applicable. The lessons of fearing an FBI visit for just sharing text files was correct: being free to speak and not fear oppression due to not what you say but what it implies is what freedom of speech is. It’s quite uncontroversial to say that people who explicitly advocate specific violence are breaking the just laws around that and should be suppressed. The controversy is around what speech adjacent to that is not just permissible, but if it’s just to jump to conclusions about a person’s motives or intentions and act on them in the absence of illegal speech.

You will find that the people who were on the unsavoury bbs are the people who are against censorship today.

Out of the half dozen people I know from that period in my life (2000-2006) not one has had a kind thing to say about facebook, google or twitter since 2010. Those firms are the lame dinosaur stuck in a tar pit that we made fun of Microsoft for being in the 00s.

It's the people who called us nerds and made high school hell for us that somehow ended up in hr at tech co and are now setting policy there.

That may be a more valid perspective, but I don't think these are homogeneous groups. I will say it's been surprising and disappointing to see people who have been railing against tech company centralized power for years, it turns out their big issue is more when that power is not directed in a direction they like.

> I will say it's been surprising and disappointing to see people who have been railing against tech company centralized power for years, it turns out their big issue is more when that power is not directed in a direction they like.

What else can you do?

Saying that tech co is wrong today is as much career suicide as saying that the US deserved 9/11 was in 2002. I even had one guy tell me he is going full accelerationist on his main twitter because the http based internet is a dead end and the more unusable it becomes the sooner we will get something better.

You're making a false equivalence.[1] The "dweb" people were indeed merely anarchic and irresponsible. The deeper, conspiracy-minded parts of the MAGA community are verifiably dangerous. They said for weeks that a storm is coming, that they were going to take washington, that congress had to be stopped, that the vice president should be executed, etc...

And then on Wednesday they made the attempt.

Comments like yours are predicated on this idea that speech itself can only ever be merely "irresponsible". But... the world isn't like that. If you spend years making "jokes" about insurrection, you eventually find someone attacking congress.

[1] Edit to answer the question below: you are falsely equating harmless anarchic geeks of the 80's and 90's with violent terrorists. It's not appropriate to manage these communities using the same tools.

I have no idea what equivalence you're accusing me of, you seem to have made up a whole story about what I am saying that isn't there.

Edit: OK, I'm not making that equivalence. My use of the word "adjacent" was deliberate and intentional. That's the point of this whole debate.

I think this is overplayed at this point. You must concede one of only two possibilities.

1) The capitol building has all along been an easy soft target that could have been infiltrated by a small contingent of terrorist.

2) The police purposefully stood down and allowed this to happen while doing the minimum to make it seem like they tried.

Neither option is a good look for our country.

Now compound that with using this event as a popular excuse to restrict free speech, when the correct reaction should be to improve security at the capitol for any enemy.

If you think this goes away becuse big tech takes even moderate voices down, you don't understand what's going on.

I worked on Capitol Hill for years. The Capitol is not a soft target. Its security measures are taken very seriously. Multiple agencies are responsible for its protection. Multiple strategies are in play from intelligence ops to deadly force. These agencies handle crowd control for dozens of very large protests every year. They are world experts in preventing violence, terrorism, and rioting. The Capitol is the very center of our government and the most powerful symbol of democracy in the world.

Some things went very wrong. It should not have been possible for a loosely organized mob to breach the perimeter, let alone get inside. There must have been some complicity or even permission. On the other hand, some things went exactly as they should have. Lawmakers were rapidly taken to safety. No VIPs were injured. Bloodshed was kept to a minimum through careful deescalation.

Overall I think we came to within inches of a major tragedy. It was avoided through a mix of competence and incompetence. We were lucky and we should consider ourselves warned.

I dont see reason for people to downvote you: I find it exceptionally hard to believe that the capital building does not have a proper response to a small group of people trying to storm the building.

Here is my theory: the "coup" was such an utter non-threat that those in charge did not want to give an ounce of evidence regarding how they could respond in order to prevent legitimately threatening bad actors from understanding the possibilities.

The side effect of being able to move towards more restricted speech is just icing on the cake.

After seeing thousands of soldiers with machine guns in full military gear with armored vehicles protecting the Capital from Black Lives Matter, your statement sounds ridiculous.

Perhaps a history of burning and looting might have had some influence in that difference.

Sometimes I wonder, and serious question here, when the reporter on TV stands in front of a burning building and exclaims the protest is mostly peaceful, do you see the building in background on fire?

I mean, I see the capitol building being broken into and think "that needs to stop, bring in the military if necessary".

Right wing millitias and groups have history of violence last years in USA. They also talked about their plans openly. It is not like the bombs they brought to capitol were shock this January. It was not first bomb plan.

Also, in videos you see organized trained equipped men in uniforms. That is absolutely something agencies are expected to follow.

> Here is my theory: the "coup" was such an utter non-threat that those in charge did not want to give an ounce of evidence regarding how they could respond in order to prevent legitimately threatening bad actors from understanding the possibilities.

Six people died! How is that an "utter non-threat"? The mental revisionism is out of control. How is it that people are so unwilling to condemn the most obvious kind of political violence imaginable?

You can condemn it, be fearful of it, and be specific with regards to the threat it presents. It presents threats. I assume the specific threat the poster was refuting (which I won’t throw my 2c on here) is that it posed a threat to materializing a new government in the United States, which is typically the top of mind threat when talking about coups. So citing the number of deaths is neither here nor there in assessing the validity that it was a legitimate threat to creating a new government and ending the previous one.

I hadn't thought of that, yet I see the sense in the thought.

However, I don't think providing adequate police presence for a planned protest would have been showing your hand.

"2) The police purposefully stood down and allowed this to happen while doing the minimum to make it seem like they tried."

seems likely that the trumpers gave that order so their mob could get in

These can both be true

Really? Can a weak man lose an arm wrestling match to a stronger opponent and truly say "I let you win?"

Either the authorities were capable of repulsing an hundred unarmed civilians or they were not.

I'm unclear how both can be true, but I'm open to ideas.

Other explanation:

Republicans have mostly posted online, rallied with Trump etc while BLM and friends has been torching cities, looting etc.

Basically the police weren't expecting anything near this from this crowd and it took them by surprise.

Disgusting anyways.

The white supremacists and other violent right wing groups (Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, etc.,) had been planning for a while. In plain view of anyone paying attention. There was plenty of warning. So, the fact that no preparation beyond the waist high barriers was done is surprising, no? https://www.propublica.org/article/capitol-rioters-planned-f...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/trump-ri...

Yes, it was clear security was needed. But this wasn't any of those groups.

That's simply wrong. Representatives of all of those groups were seen breaking into the capitol. The Oath Keepers in particular seem to have had a large and heavily militarized detachment. There is a video of a line of them in full body armor marching up the steps past the throng to enter the building.

Likewise known Proud Boys and 3%'ers were present, etc... This was the Place to Be for all militant right wingers, and those who couldn't be in DC were staging protests elsewhere. IIRC there were violent actions on the same day at both the Oregon and Kansas state houses.

Everyone Knew they were going to be there. Everyone Knew they had the potential to be violent. And Everyone Knew that Trump's rhetoric was inciteful. None of this was a surprise. And it finally boiled over into real violence. There's no excusing or downplaying that. We could absolutely have seen this coming, and lots of people did.

"Oath Keepers in particular seem to have had a large and heavily militarized detachment"

Source video? Larping in camo and a helmet doesn't make you militarized or an oath keeper.

I saw it on twitter, but this article has it too along with a good overview of the subject:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/several-well-know...

You keep dodging. First it was "these groups aren't there" now they're just LARPers in camo and don't matter. People keep shooting down your arguments and you keep moving the goalposts.

Accusing people of doing exactly what you're doing is a well worn and bazar tactic that I'll never understand. Does it work?

You even provided a "quote" of something I never said. Good on you.

You made a statement "Oath Keepers in particular seem to have had a large and heavily militarized detachment". I asked for source video, which you now can't find and instead offer a video that doesn't corroborate your statement. So, who is moving goal posts?

What I am saying is the people causing the violence (including in the video you provided) are crazy larpers and MAGA fanatics, not oath keepers. Oath keepers are typically former military, open carry weapons, and don't look like they just broke out of mom's basement.

I am also saying I haven't seen a video of anyone who looks militarized in either organization, coordinated assault tactics, or armament. Can you cite a source video that demonstrates your statement is even close to true?

> big tech takes even moderate voices down

Can you cite some "moderate voices" that have been taken down by big tech? They're all still up as far as I can see. Trump incited an attack on congress. He got banned. Parler deliberately cultivated an extreme community of violent rhetoric (they really did, have you looked at that site?). They got banned. Who else? Seems like only people reasonably identifiable as extremists are affected.

I remain horrified at the right wing community's ability to rationalize violence. The President directed an attack on Congress last Wednesday to prevent his opponent's certification. And... what people really want to talk about is Parler losing their hosting?

(Edit to note that you refused to answer the question and jumped off on a WHATABOUTBLM?! tangent instead. In fact, contra your hyperbole, no moderate right wing voices have been censored or silenced.)

"Trump incited an attack on congress."

Evidence of Trump telling people to storm the capitol?

"I remain horrified at the right wing community's ability to rationalize violence"

We'll, I'm right of center and I condemn it. Just like I'm sure there is a history of you condemning this entire year of BML and Antifa burning and looting cities across the US.

I remember what Como said on CNN. "who said protests need to be peaceful". Of course CNN is the bastion of right wing extremists... Oh wait....

We have to condemn all political violence.

If you spend a whole year burning and looting a city and the city is still there you weren't very good at it.

I haven't tried, I make things, not destroy other people's things.

Don't get me wrong, there's definitely a double standard at work. I recall every news outlet spending bottles of ink explaining how massive BLM protests somehow weren't spreading covid but now the capitol protests are. However I think there's a fundamental difference between breaking into a Target and looting it and attacking the capitol of the United States. Of particular concern are all of the side details. The detail that a threat assessment was not done for this protest despite knowing about it weeks in advance. The fact the police responded less strongly to this attack than they did to a protest by disabled veterans in wheelchairs and later took selfies with the attackers. The fact that insurgents carrying blue lives matter flags beat a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher. The detail that the person speaking to this crowd just a few hours earlier was the president of the United States.

> I recall every news outlet spending bottles of ink explaining how massive BLM protests somehow weren't spreading covid but now the capitol protests are

It's actually been reported that a covid-positive individual was clustered with members of congress during the evacuation. I don't know why you think that isn't correct to report.

It is correct to report. My point was that any large crowd of people is likely to spread covid.

In Germany the government used census data tabulated on IBM punchcard equipment to find who to round up. Later, during the liquidation phase of the effort each camp had punch card equipment to help with maintaining the inventory of slave labor skills. That's what the number on the arm was for - the primary key. Copies of punched cards were sent to the central administrative HQ of the camp organization for additional processing and were used to identify specific skilled people who needed to be moved to other camps. Authoritarians rely on the stupid for the grunt work but they're not stupid themselves and can exploit technology to achieve their goals.

How is this relevant to my point or the article?

it was in response to the comment about decentralized apps built by idealistic silicon valley types being used by MAGA types. The point being that it might be funny to him but authoritarians do have a track record of exploiting technology.

But these apps are explicitly designed to be decentralised and avoid state control! I'm no fan of e.g. the capitol rioters, but the analogy with IBM and the Nazis seems to get things backwards. The rioters don't control the government apparatus, they are trying to subvert it. And the use of this technology is to aid that by preventing centralised censorship and snooping.

If you really want to power past Godwin's law, then you could compare them to Hitler in the 1920s, subverting the Weimar constitution.

Given their past, I found it just a little rich, that IBM so publicly decried the recent "insurrection." [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/ArvindKrishna/status/1346932293991079936

Well the IBM of today has little to do with the IBM of 80 years ago. Just like the Germany of today has little to do with what happened 80 years ago and people living now are not and should not be held responsible for the misdeeds of previous generations.

> people living now are not and should not be held responsible for the misdeeds of previous generations.

I'm sure we could all agree on this point.

However, the aspects of IBM that led to their assisting the Third Reich are still very much alive at IBM today. It remains in the form of their core business model of assisting the world's most powerful regimes in automating oppression, autocracy, and authoritarianism at a global scale.

Okay fair point. But sadly that holds for most companies. There are remarkably few of them that do not sell or provide support on FOSS to big governments that in turn do all kinds of nasty things. How can we change this, if at all? Isn’t it part of capitalism?

The goal of decentralization isn't to give a voice to people inciting violence, however that is a consequence of such systems when you share technology with everyone - though we shouldn't fear this, we do need to actively and proactively counter it at a higher layer, educating people and helping them heal their closed heart and mind.

The goal of decentralization is to take power away from companies who govern poorly or in a way we don't agree with, so our data and network is mobile, so we can "vote" by leaving their platform - and not buy their products or services or give them our attention to monetize with ads. And then once this fluid system exists with a hierarchy of good, good hearted, well meaning governors - we must then focus on educating and healing the population - where we won't reach them easily in the digital world due to self-perpetuating filter bubbles, anyone who tries to reason with them are ignored or simply ban/blocked to reenforce their echo chamber.

Inciting violence is illegal in most countries, you can still prosecute people who participate in such actions with a decentralised system.

You might not be able to remove their speech but it would still have consequences (again in most countries).

This could even be worse for people who engage in such activities since you can't remove your words in hindsight! I've seen a lot of back-pedalling and removing of tweets from people.

If you can find out who they are then certainly they could be prosecuted, it's one reason I feel or think that in the future I mostly only want to engage on platforms - decentralized or not - that have an identity verification for the accounts so any bad or unacceptable behaviour can be addressed.

I still juggle in my head as to what kinds of behaviour would be acceptable or not - things like racism, calls for violence would be obvious and go through a review and moderation protocol and start with temporary suspensions (a time out in the corner), and after X offences, then a block or limiting of function until some other remedy is met. Where I wonder how much of a caring hand to impose when necessary are things surrounding say bullying or perhaps someone being non-critical or arguably abusive by simply saying "you're stupid" or other name calling. Arguably I'd want people on the platforms I engage on to be trying to improve themselves, to grow, to improve their emotional regulation and manage that impulse or energy that leads them to calling someone stupid instead into developing a deeper understanding - responding instead of reacting; or realizing engaging with certain people is futile, and to put their energy and passion more into the physical world instead of their keyboard. I wonder how many people are ready for such an environment, for that level of a safe space.

> educating people and helping them heal their closed heart and mind

> we must then focus on educating and healing the population

Do you not see how wrong this sounds? Who gets to create this “healing” education curriculum which will “open hearts and minds”?

You're making an assumption - you're assuming my statement means there's force involved, which what I said doesn't insinuate that. You can educate society by putting ads on TV, as one example - which I am arguably against ads because of their shallow, cheap, manipulative aspect of them - but it's the status quo and perhaps an acceptable bridge to use. And indeed, who determines the curriculum will be the individual that wants to follow it. It has in fact been historically bad when a government body states something health wise as fact - such as the "Food Pyramids" of what your daily diet should consist of, which still is heavily influenced by food industrial complexes.

Another assumption you've made is there would be a singular curriculum, which I never argued for either. Learning and healing will be decentralized and fluid to some degree, the effort must be in providing the resources for people to access the healing and education, while skillfully directing people through the nuances and also providing whatever tools they may need to succeed at the practices they will benefit from taking on, and access to diagnostics that can give insight and help guide someone to help them orient through problem solving.

We're all at different points on our path, of our understanding, some further along in one area than another and then you can learn from them - or teach them something they're less familiar if they're interested in that moment of interaction with you or what you've put out in the world. In fact you want a huge amount of diversity - people who explain things differently, people who have different personalities - we need the diversity to be attractive to diverse people. There does need to be a core protocol that gets developed, evolves, and should be referenced and a research methodology followed for conflicts that may appear, where disagreement occurs say of one practitioner calling bullshit on some claim someone else is making. One of my previous family physicians, middle aged man - not very healthy himself, was skeptical and didn't believe stem cell treatments I had - the healing that had already occurred - he was skeptical, didn't believe that it actually helped and that any benefit I may be experience wouldn't last; stem cell treatments 100% work for regenerating/healing many tissues of the body if the doctor knows what they're doing, however this is an example of a disconnect between current knowledge (stem cells have been being used for treatment for 25-30 years now) vs. mainstream understanding; this also points to a broken, stagnant system of how most doctors aren't knowledgable in the latest (not talking about within the last year of knowledge but it seems to take decades in some cases for the knowledge to propagate to the front line).

One of my goals is to create a system where community thrives, community which means relationship building and learning through communicating, and a system where the brightest stars are able to shine so more people are attracted to what they have to share - and hopefully learn from it - and then those students become teachers and so the process continues.

I can see how someone can easily interpret what I said, fear being invoked that this "must educate" people could be akin to the CCP's "re-education camps" - however no, I'm solely talking about voluntary participation - but there are ways to lead people towards healing practices, ways to incentivizes it, ways to make it more available, more accessible.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply.

You mention educating and healing twice. Could you elaborate on who "we" is, and also, how we can go from where we are to a place where education and healing is taking place? What are the steps we should take?

I'm writing a slowly book on this, so there's a lot to share to answer such a question; I'm also slowly planning out a network of health-wellness differentiated online platforms to provide practical tools for people to develop their self-awareness, to gain and maintain their health.

We is everyone who is conscious enough and on the path of good (practice of non-violence to other and self, whether specifically acknowledged or not) or of healing, those who are more self-aware than not, who have developed their critical thinking more and less indoctrinated. There's of course a huge spectrum of where people are in this evolution or growth stage. Part of the challenge is rallying good hearted people, rallying, organizing and directing them and resources in the most efficient way possible.

The book will be a story of my healing journey including the incompetence I've encountered throughout our health systems, along with sharing my proposed solutions, explaining my own project plans to try to solve for those problems by providing practical tools to people. I will also be explaining a protocol I'm developing to help guide people to develop their self-awareness, to gain and maintain health, including everything from food sensitivities, fasting, yoga, acupuncture, entheogens like Ayahuasca, MDMA-assisted therapy, inner child regression therapy, stem cell treatments/regenerative medicine, etc.

In short, it's all about organizing and directing resources efficiently, while eliminating the waste. There are deep flaws to the health systems: indoctrination, a lack of multidisciplinary approach, industrial complexes who've influenced the knowledge and current practices, and more. The how of getting to a place where education and healing is taking place is - every possible way, any entrance point to direct people onto the path that they're willing to open the door to. For many people they only begin to care about their health after an impetus occurs. The reality is most people on average aren't very awake, conscious yet, and so indoctrination is easy - and then those indoctrinated are "sheep" following the status quo - and so what has to happen is the culture needs to shift, so then by default you're following a path that's healthy and supporting critical thinking and self-awareness development - which will lead to gaining and maintaining health - individually, community wide and globally.

I think it's actually rather sad. I think there is a good chance that these in my opinion very important technologies will get a bad reputation because of this.

You mean like the bad reputation that has been established for ages that decentralized technologies are "only good for" piracy, CP, etc.?

Same with encryption, no? Also, you forgot to mention terrorism.

Of course this is highly subject, but I think that the view of the general public is generally favorable towards encryption (as it also provides privacy), and governments/law enforcement agencies have again more recently tried to paint it in a bad light. I think the jury is still out whether that is successful, and the public will adapt that opinion too.

I know very little about Scuttlebutt, but supposing, say an ex-president decided to start using it. Would it be able to handle the level of traffic this might generate?

I realise it's decentralised, but would that, for example, at some point require every one who were to get on Scuttlebutt to download on 80gb file in order to get started?

his followers can barely figure out how to get on parler, many of them thought parler groups on facebook was parler itself. They will NEVER, ever, figure out scuttlebutt, DJT couldn't even figure out scuttlebutt.

People want to sign up and login easily. This doesn't seem to do any of that. Convenience is king and necessity it's history maker.

Well, I guess it would.

Firstly, only the followers (and maybe their friends) would need to download 80GB of videos posted by that supposed ex-prez.

Then, it's peer-to-peer. I don't know the details, though. It could be torrent (very effective, scalable), or direct connections (poorly scalable).

Some pubs (servers) can retain your data, IIRC, though they could pick who they accept.

Syncing would be pretty easy on local networks and sneakernets, provided you have the storage capacity.

In some ways we’ve come full circle: SV was enabled by defence types, I bet a lot of the early work in advanced electronics and decentralized communications was carried out by “square” types who used “socialist” as an insult. There are still plenty of traditionalist right-wingers in STEM.

Remove "decentralized" and you largely described Twitter's trajectory.

Segregation is what you get when you permanently remove people from platforms. Sounds almost like a truism.

Kind of funny? The US branch of libertarianism ain't exactly left wing.

Tech libertarianism (not just US) has always leaned right, toward anarcho-capitalism.

Gab (the basically Nazi version of Twitter) is the biggest Mastodon instance, for example.

Why'd this guy get downvoted? Are either of these assertions incorrect?

It's asserted upthread that gab isn't part of the wider network anymore, so that's objectively untrue, and "Nazi Twitter" is subjective, but a reasonable person could question it.

It’s not part of the largest network, as no big Mastodon server federates with it, but it is a Mastodon instance

“Nazi” is a racial slur for a white person that doesn’t hate themselves or their ancestors.

I can't believe I have to say this, but no, that is not what "nazi" means.

“Nazi” is literally short for NAtionalsoZIalistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.

Twitter is the nazi version of twitter, gab is the freedom version.