Venkatesh Rao

“I’ll defend to the death my right to quote Voltaire and Orwell at the libs who kicked you out of the public square, but could you very special people, err... not come to my site right now? It’s not that we don’t want you, but we’re... errr redoing the css wallpaper”

Even Fox is quietly shuffling off to the sides while publishing headlines with words like “muzzling” even though it would be trivial for them to set up the biggest Mastodon server overnight to grab this moment.

Though you’d need a scaling expert, having participated in setting up a modestly active mastodon, this really is not that hard. There’s an audience of tens of millions up for grabs. Maybe there just hadn’t been enough time and there will be a bunch of land-grab efforts soon.

Nobody is actually defending the stated line of concern and building a pure paradigm free-speech platform. And there’s enough billionaires pretending to defend that line that they could even set up a CDN network and a data center.

I don’t care to convince anyone of my own position on these matters, but I do care about vague suggestions of monopoly and “de facto public square” crap. That’s just not true and I don’t want it being accepted as such. Twitter is *a* public square, not *the* public square.

This is what is known in the business as a high-maintenance audience. A crowd it’s costly to serve a self-speaking platform to, but doesn’t fit the “speak for the voiceless” pattern either.

Possibly true, but a) there are/have been many brilliant techies who are/would have been Trumpies (Shockley, Metcalfe,... Palmer Luckey probably counts too) b) there are many who probably can’t fix their own tech problems (artists etc) who I do want to hear fromhttps://twitter.com/the_aiju/status/1348048061755498507 …

It’s not that they can’t do what’s necessary. It’s that they know they’ll never be the majority, and they want recognition of their preferred rules of engagement on the majority platform. They don’t want to admit they’re merely disliked by a majority without being oppressed.