and why does that matter? They later switched to ActivityPub/Mastodon for a bit. They still run a Mastodon fork, but defederated back in May.
Gab was also banned explicitly by URL by any app makers and in many ActivityPub libraries (you can find checks where it hashes the URL and compares it to known Gab URLs).
> a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech
We're in a bizarre world right now where you can label any opinion you don't agree with as hate speech, dehumanize police and call every conservative a literal Nazi and that's all okay now for some reason.
At some point we have to remember that historically, a lot of people who thought they were right, about slavery, homosexuality, war, abortion, polygamy, and other controversial topics, eventually came down on the wrong side of history.
The attack on speech and ideas has never been more profound. If you don't like an idea, you don't have to listen, but people are going to continue to go to fringes whenever their voices are silences. That will create more extreme platforms and more extremism, not less.
Ah, the delicious irony of attacking certain types of speech and ideas as "attacks on speech and ideas". What they are doing and what you are doing are no different; it's all just politics. There's not even anything new about what's happening today. How do you think people's minds were changed on all those "controversial" topics you cite? A whole lot of social pressure. You don't get to make lofty statements about free speech, and then turn around and grumble that other people's speech somehow isn't "playing fair".
There is holocaust denying, calls to kill blacks and rape fantasies about female politicians and movie stars. There are literal calls for the rise of the white race to eradicate everyone else on the front page of gab daily. If you want to defend shit like this on the merit of free speech the probability that you are in fact a white nationalist are not to far.
And the history is plastered with censorship the world was never more free than it is now you are just repeating non facts without even doing a hint of research.
Gab was also banned explicitly by URL by any app makers and in many ActivityPub libraries (you can find checks where it hashes the URL and compares it to known Gab URLs).
> a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech
We're in a bizarre world right now where you can label any opinion you don't agree with as hate speech, dehumanize police and call every conservative a literal Nazi and that's all okay now for some reason.
At some point we have to remember that historically, a lot of people who thought they were right, about slavery, homosexuality, war, abortion, polygamy, and other controversial topics, eventually came down on the wrong side of history.
The attack on speech and ideas has never been more profound. If you don't like an idea, you don't have to listen, but people are going to continue to go to fringes whenever their voices are silences. That will create more extreme platforms and more extremism, not less.