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They'd get banned for spam.

I feel like Lemmy also has a problem with corporate troll farms.

Reddit is far worse though with bots and establishment troll farm shill accounts.

I have mixed feelings. "Because I said so" can get compliance in high school, but that's mostly it. It's not going to be that effective. At the same time, a lot of this overly permissive parenting seems like a reaction by people who are upset about being told no as kids and that will lead to problems, especially once they get into places that don't care about constantly trying to have a debate back and fourth.

The "critical mass of users" is the essential part. People want to participate where there are already other people.

A lot of the old forum applications still exist. A lot of old school forums are actually still around. The problem with old school forums compared to Reddit or Lemmy is that it's just so much easier to get people to join a subreddit or a Lemmy community. If someone discovers a subreddit, all they need to do is go there and start posting. Creating a new account usually isn't that hard but it's still a considerable hurdle for someone who is considering joining.

Old school forums are simply too decentralized. It's a lot easier to get reddit.com to come up in search results then it is for some relatively obscure forum.

I'm going to try setting up an instance but one issue with it that I see is that instance owners will be the only permitted uploaders for most instances since storage and bandwidth is a huge issue when it comes to video hosting platforms.

Odysee is is one of the few alternative platforms with a decent left wing audience. The only other majority progressive platforms are Mastodon and Lemmy, though Lemmy has a lot of neo-progressive tankies and angry conservative tankies.

The vast majority of people aren't even going to know or care. A lot of people will probably just continue on even when their adblocker becomes less effective. Of course the type of people who use adblockers are also more likely to wonder why their adblocker suddenly became less effective and then switch to a browser where it's more effective.

It takes a lot to change the inertia that already exists. People have been predicting the rise of the Linux desktop for at least a decade now and it still hasn't really caught on.

It's a shame because the thing that kills alternative platforms is getting flooded with racists to the point that they drive everyone else out.

A lot of "free speech" platforms box themselves into a corner by declaring themselves "free speech" platforms while intending that to mean they won't ban users for mild wrongthink, but then white supremacists show up, and if they get banned then they start causing a massive shitstorm over the fact that the platform isn't truly supporting free speech. Then they drive out all the normal people who don't want to be associated with them and the platform is forced to shutdown.

Then you have morons like Tim Pool who will endlessly attack "free speech" platforms if they ban white supremacists.

I have watched super progressive content on Youtube but also watched conservative content as well. It's possible there are a lot of progressives who also watch content from the other side so the algorithm pushes it.

Unfortunately that's one of the problems with a lot of alternative platforms.

I have Yunohost installed on my local network and they have DNS adblocking apps that you can install.

You can also very easily install apps like Owncloud to have your own version of Google Drive.