> Doesn’t it provoke your professional interest - how they managed to do it?
No, because that's not the hard part. Anyone can host a niche community "off grid" and make it profitable. It being niche is what enables that. It's not hard to get 2000 dedicated people to fuck around with crypto and side loading apps. It's basically impossible to get a critical mass of average people to do it.
Visa and Apple control their platforms by "offering" usability to the average person (mostly by taking away other easy options or out competing them with a moat). The only way the current crop of sites can fail now is if it becomes so bad that the censorship itself is more inconvenient than the difficult steps to work around mainstream infrastructure.
If something like Gab got to like 20-30% the size of Reddit and 99% of it's userbase was normal people doing normal people stuff then I'd be interested. Because before that point we're not going to see any real effort from the incumbents to stop them.
No, because that's not the hard part. Anyone can host a niche community "off grid" and make it profitable. It being niche is what enables that. It's not hard to get 2000 dedicated people to fuck around with crypto and side loading apps. It's basically impossible to get a critical mass of average people to do it.
Visa and Apple control their platforms by "offering" usability to the average person (mostly by taking away other easy options or out competing them with a moat). The only way the current crop of sites can fail now is if it becomes so bad that the censorship itself is more inconvenient than the difficult steps to work around mainstream infrastructure.
If something like Gab got to like 20-30% the size of Reddit and 99% of it's userbase was normal people doing normal people stuff then I'd be interested. Because before that point we're not going to see any real effort from the incumbents to stop them.