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Social Media Alternatives for Conservatives
So this may be a topic that is already addressed somewhere on Ricochet, but I am new here and still trying to find my way around. I found Ricochet while searching for social media platforms for conservatives. I’m shocked by the lack of alternatives given the hostile treatment we get on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Is it that difficult to collect resources and technological expertise for a platform to upload videos (serious question, not rhetorical)? If anyone is aware of good alternatives please list them in a comment. As I am aware:
- Ricochet is a close match to a social media platform
- CRTV is doing a good job providing media content, but it does not allow general users to upload content
- Gab.ai is a Twitter alternative
- Others???
Given the current social media environment for conservative ideas, creating alternatives to the leftist giants should be a top priority for conservative/libertarian movers and shakers. If our voices cannot be heard then our ideas cannot be shared. If our ideas cannot be shared then we will lose the next generation of Americans and with them our liberties.
Published in General
@typewriterking you seem to be someone who has a base of technical knowledge far and above my own. Do you believe that the main obstacles are:
Hmmm… I wonder if there could be room for open source to develop a social media core that could be built on by whoever for whatever but can provide easy account creation across all.
That’s basically what email is. It’s a standard internal core for input and output that different email options have dressed up and added their own features to. They all share the same core, which is why they universally work without everyone using the same platform.
I created a Gab account yesterday after reading Ryan’s initial post, but just deleted it. I was on it for less than 24 hours. It didn’t take much time to realize how awful it was. Pity.
I also think the problem is less about social media in general and more about the over-politicization of everything. I mean, I might like to have an online conversation about jazz without a dozen lefties telling me how “whitey” stole jazz from black people. Or I might like to ask my social network to pray for a friend going through a rough time without a lecture from a bunch of atheists about how I still believe in fairy tales. Crap like that. I just want to be a normal person again with a bunch of outside interests, with politics being one of those interests. I never signed up for politics dominating everything. The thing about any of these conservative social media alternatives is they’re all politics, all the time. I come to Ricochet when I want to discuss politics. I got on Facebook originally because I wanted to reconnect with old friends and talk about anything other than politics. Is there anywhere one can go and just be sane and normal?
Does anybody remember Taponline? It was the first web-based social network I signed up for, way back in 1996/97. It’s so obscure that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry, but at the time it had a pretty big user base.
…
The Wayback Machine at archive.org has a few snapshots. Looks like it died around 2000.
https://web.archive.org/web/20000301045039/http://www.taponline.com:80/
I love this comment, it speaks so much truth. I don’t think such a platform exists because the left has politicized everything. You can’t watch a movie, listen to the news, go to a football game, listen to music, grab a coffee at a local coffee shop, or make a damn pizza without it being political. The left politicizes everything because politicals and political power is their religion. Just like everything I do goes through the lens of my religious, God-oriented worldview, the left’s lens is that of the political. They search for meaning in the political and we are stuck with the ramifications.
I was imagineering something similiar. The idea of an interoperable open source social media platform that could be set up as a decentralized network without a single source of power.
You could call it MySpace–which doesn’t seem to be in current use.
@ryankasak Ricochet was recommended to me by a conservative that I trust, and yes, I am new here, too. The nice thing about this site is the ability to have a deeper conversation with like-minded individuals. For me, Facebook is mostly for family/friends and dog videos and pictures (that is how I disconnect from political rubbish); Twitter used to be a lot of fun, but has become a mundane pit of vitriol being spewed by both sides of the political aisle. I keep my Twitter account for those rare moments of reality that come through. As for Gab, I do have an account there, but rarely sign in; it is a little intense. One of the many drawbacks with any form of social media is that you will always have people involved who want to make it awful for everyone else. Open and productive debate with those who have opposing views is a good thing, until one side or the other devolves into a profanity-laced, name-calling mess. For me, the best alternative is to turn social media off and go have a face-to-face conversation with real people who are not hiding behind a keyboard.
Welcome to Ricochet – glad you’re here!
I’ve no suggestions to make regarding other social media platforms as alternatives to the Big Three (Twitter-Facebook-YouTube). I don’t use Twitter, have mostly withdrawn from Facebook, and lately have been using YouTube to find concealed carry instructional videos. (Also the occasional rant about how awful “The Last Jedi” is…)
If we want an open space where our views are heard, get The Daily Wire, Rebel Media, CRTV, PJMedia, billwhittle.com, FoxNews, The Resurgent, OAN and The Blaze in one room and have them pick one outlet and have them sell it to their audiences. Get Limbaugh, Levin and Prager on board. Get the NRA there. Get YAF and AEI and FIRE on board to bring in hundreds of thousands of young people in. Get non-conservatives like Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin and a one or two others involved. Get religious organizations involved, get the on-line gun enthusiasts, preppers, veteran groups, etc.
Get it organized. You will have easily tens of millions of folks world-wide on the network daily. At that point Trump would jump in on it and that will set it.
Numbers one and two aren’t challenges. I see others linking to open-source platforms Diaspora. It isn’t much more complicated to start a social media site than copying some files and paying a host. “Monetizing” with ads isn’t that hard, either. That’s typically as easy as pasting some code.
Number three isn’t that hard, either. Everybody that has used a blog commenting widget like Disqus, or, before that, JS-Kit/Echo, is used to having a commenting system that recognizes accounts from across the web. Just expand the commenting system to being the whole social network, and the whole issue of convincing people to sign up vanishes.
Number four, the Other, in my opinion, is displaying a feed that keeps people as hooked as Facebook. Figuring out how to get people more hooked on a different news/friends feed seems an issue more in the realm of psychology than coding.
Another new one:
https://www.idka.com/en/
I think Facebook started on a university’s servers and bandwidth; I suspect the sudden need for both is why when the YouTube’s gun content had to find a new home, that turned out to be the proniverse: there’s a lot of video content there already and the capacity to distribute it.
Which is itself beginning to restrict non-PC content
Do tell. (Please.)
Bingo Ryan! That is more in line with what I am thinking about. A central place for people to go for content from conservative heavy hitters and for users to upload, generate, share their own content. I agree, this is what is necessary.
There has been a number of “conservative” alternatives that all fail, because the conservative ghetto offers no nonpolitical value, and is objectively bad for the country and liberals especially.
Disqus has this to say:
Spot on. I’ve thought seriously about bailing on Facebook but the reality is, I advertise my business there to a universe of people who know me and are prospective clients, and I’ve reconnected with hold friends from high school and grade school there. As annoying as it’s sanctimony bordering on censorship is, it’s been useful to me.
MyLawn?
I am looking for a platform that has a policy something like this: “Constitutionally protected hate speech is welcome here. In addition, we will at our discretion delete and block bigoted comments meant to demean any person’s race, nationality, religion, and social or biological origin.”
Now coming to you from the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment:
If the first sentences’ worth were to happen, that’s probably fundable, to help scale up the infrastructure of whatever platform was chosen. Anyone know Peter Thiel?
This is wishful thinking. OpenID has largely failed because single points of identification are not robust in the face of attack, whether a denial of service or a persistent hack or operator bias. Frankly, I think the latter is the biggest threat. FWIW, I block facebook at all the routers and WiFi access points I control, and Disqus and similar sprawling content entities are blacklisted with NoScript in my browser.
Single-Sign-On is a panacea for the problems of administering a network (from the provider’s POV) and identity management for multiple networks (from the user’s POV), but it is a horrible idea for user’s security and privacy. SSO will not be the driver of massive adoption of social networks.
I believe that roughly 50% of people who vote in America vote for Republicans. Of those people, a smaller percentage are actually conservative. It is important to note that not everyone elected as a Republican is conservative; Republicans win the governorship of Massachusetts frequently even though it’s a very liberal state, because they often are liberal Republicans. Further, not everyone who votes Republican does so thinking in terms of being for or against the left; some people just do it based on their own assessment of who is better or worse in office.
A rough estimate I once heard is that 40% of voters in the US will always vote Republican, 40% will always vote Democrat, and 20% swing between parties. If we assume that the 40% of people who vote Republican are conservative, and that only 30% of the public votes in any given election year, conservatives make up about 12% of the United States. That is probably an overestimate.
This is true, but the problem is that being simply “against the left” isn’t exactly enough to paper over differences between various anti-leftist groups. I mean, the National Front in France might think of itself as an anti-leftist group, but it wants a society for France that any right wing American should consider extremely statist to the point of being bonkers.
As if to prove my point, a bunch of people may even join this thread and comment on how my judgement of them is unfair and wrong.
I think you are right that this should appealing but it brings its own problems. As others here have pointed out, not everyone who wants a platform that doesn’t censor is going to be highly thoughtful, intelligent, conservative people such as ourselves. I’m sure whatever is left of ISIS and creepy people who like to trade child porn might also. So at some point, you get dragged into playing the moderation game, and that means you’re going to be acting similar to Twitter.
I mean, while a certain lunacy exists in Silicon Valley, this recent censorship campaign isn’t being conducted out of pure lunacy. Twitter is doing it because they have shareholders who want to see increased revenue. In order to get increased revenue, they want more users, and one of the biggest complaints about Twitter is that it’s a cess pool. So they started doing this stuff a few years ago.
Twitter’s mistake was that they made the people most responsible for turning its service into a cess pool the people who are supposed to clean up the cess. That and it’s a poorly run company that needs to be bought by some heartless Wall Street corporate raider type who can make the company profitable just by laying off half of it.
Just a note, I feel like I’ve expounded way more than usual, so I’m chopping this last comment up so I don’t repeat myself too much.
They did, but they all brought something totally new, or in the case of Facebook, did it much better than previously existing competitors. Both of those are hard entrepreneurial problems to solve if you want to start a direct competitor against them. I don’t know that moderation is enough of an improvement, unless you had an especially novel way of doing it. I mean, as good as Ricochet is at providing a decent place for civil commentary, it still struggles at striking the right balance sometimes. That’s because it’s a really hard problem.
I’m relatively new to Ricochet, but I think this was the thought at its start, and they seem to have moved away from this model thinking that it’s not really as effective or necessary. Though I’m really not sure because I don’t know what it was like in the beginning.