@sullybiker You see, you're taking a longer term view. Most people I see posting online are only thinking "this will make it harder for people I don't like to post online or to organize their events", while I'm looking more at #$CORPORATIONS can coordinate their activities in opposition to a smaller entity like a #Fediverse site".
It's distressing, because people aren't seeing the precedents that they're allowing to be set.
I don't know anything at all about #Parler, except that it is supposed to be a site for right-wing folks. But what happens when the political climate changes and suddenly #MastoSoc is being kicked off of every possible service (along with the cloud of instances who hold their same views as mastodon.social and its userbase)?
@geniusmusing They’re right. No matter how much someone may prefer free speech, others who host it will have to impose limits.
I saw someone recently complaining about a proposal to filter (default: on) search results for rooms on a chat platform and I thought:
1. There are legal restrictions for online content. As a platform expands into other nations, they gain more restrictions.
2. If extremist and offensive results are not hidden by default, normal users leave, rendering the platform useless except as a forum for the most extreme and anti-social people.
If #Parler is supposed to be completely unfiltered and unmoderated, they’ll find that the number of countries where they can safely operate is small.
Again, I’ve never seen the site, so I don’t know whether the content is potentially illegal or just differs politically from what the mobile appstores like. If this is mostly just a political purge, the people rejoicing should be defending them—the axe tends to swing against former allies with the same effect it wielded when swung against opponents—but I don’t think most people look at the long term implications of these things.
I'd argue that given their duopoly on mobile operating systems, the power to arbitrarily kick someone out is scary (regardless of how deserving Parler might be; I'm not even sure I've seen a screenshot of the site). I'd argue that this is evidence that the mobile OS and app store groups of both companies need to be split up, so that competition can come ... including strong competition for mobile app stores on each platform.
Again, Parler may deserve it, especially if their users used the socnet to organize their insurrection attempt. (Though I suspect many of them probably used odious #corpocentric sites like #Twitter or #Facebook, which are not being punished.)