There is no "cutting down to size", these sites are popular as the function of individual choices, short of authoritarianism you can't dictate which sites people decide to use.
I think by now one has to be extremely naive and uninformed to claim that only individual user choices are the factor in whether or not a social network can prosper.
People bring up Parler as if the political context of the very recent (at the time) attack on the U.S. capitol had no bearing on how things transpired.
> I think by now one has to be extremely naive and uninformed to claim that only individual user choices are the factor in whether or not a social network can prosper.
I'll have to replay that "naive and uninformed" label back at you if you seriously believe that sites like Parler are unpopular because of big tech collusion rather than the type of content cultivated by such sites.
BTW, another fact - most of the planning for US Capitol protest that is known about actually happened on Facebook, and livestreaming the even also happened on Facebook and Youtube. Of course, nobody shut them down for that.
Try reading my post again because I never made any such claim.
> most of the planning for US Capitol protest that is known about actually happened on Facebook
I never stated otherwise (besides calling it an attack, not a "protest"). It seems to me you have fixated on a certain perspective and are projecting that on to my comment.
These sites are popular as the function of individual choices, short of authoritarianism you can't dictate which sites people decide to use.
In fact, however, Big Tech oligopolists very much can dictate that people won't be able to use sites they want to use (despite the fact you personally don't like the content there). If I decide to use Parler but Parler is shut down by Amazon, then it's very much not a product of my individual choice.
> I never stated otherwise
And again, you said:
People bring up Parler as if the political context of the very recent (at the time) attack on the U.S. capitol had no bearing on how things transpired.
What transpired is that some people involved in Capitol protest on Jan 6 were using Parler, and many more were using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc. Parler was shut down - very much not a product of individual choice of anyone but Jeff Bezos maybe - and neither of other platforms, who played bigger role in the same event, didn't even bat an eye. So your mentioning the events at the US Capitol only goes to illustrate my point, not yours - the idea that we somehow have a free market here where people are free to choose whatever platform they like according to their individual choice is very much delusional. Some platforms have more freedoms than others, and some are subjected to strictest scrutiny - and sometimes shut down - despite the preferences of their users. That's my perspective, which aligns with known facts.
Try reading my post again because I never made any such claim.
You can invest in education and empower people to make informed choices about the source or value of the information. This is an investment governments go out of their way to avoid because it just so happens the same lack of education that gets people hooked up on low quality content is what makes them easily manipulated by the political class.
It is extremely hard to have a 2nd youtube, reddit or facebook... because of the network effects
This is a subjective distinction, but setting aside subjectivity for the sake of argument, it's a user-driven video sharing website, it's pretty similar to YouTube in many ways, but the fact that it is not synonymous is exactly my point - TikTok created something that differentiated itself from YouTube and so people flocked to it, and the fact that YouTube was already popular didn't diminish TikTok's accessibility nor did TikTok's explosion in popularity come at the cost of YouTube's popularity. TikTok created something attractive and people made individual choices to use it.
a better comparison is the conservative leaning 'rumble' - without google's massive support, it stands no chance of winning against youtube.
--
parler was the alternative to twitter and fb, and see how it was cut down for no real reason, though at the time, the entire media made it seem as if it was the most logical thing to do.
later one finds that there is more extremist stuff in fb and twitter..
also, it was interesting how all the biggies - Amazon, Google, Apple, Visa all joined hands to squelch Parler an opponent of their enemy (for ad dollars) Twitter...
speaking loosely, this is quite an example of a cartel.
tiktok and youtube have essentially the same core functionality: sharing user generated video content. YouTube even has a "Shorts" section that is entirely composed of tiktok style videos wherein most of the videos are actually ripped from tiktok.
> parler was the alternative to twitter and fb, and see how it was cut down for no real reason
Parler is an alternative to twitter and fb, it exists today, it was not "cut down" https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parler/id1402727988.
The furor over Parler was manufactured outrage, Parler was suspended from the app stores because they didn't do what the app stores asked, a very common occurrence, we could all be so lucky as to have that much publicity surrounding the suspension of our apps from the notoriously capricious app stores.
> also, it was interesting how all the biggies - Amazon, Google, Apple, Visa all joined hands to squelch Parler an opponent of their enemy (for ad dollars) Twitter...
It's not that interesting, it was an obvious reaction to Parler openly courting extremism after there had just been an attack on the U.S. capitol. Parler made themselves toxic and nobody wanted to do business with them because they were extremely unpopular. Anyway, I suspect we probably won't agree on the details of Parler, but there's no disputing that Parler's temporary shutdown was under extremely unusual circumstances.
HTTP is a request-response rather than content broadcast or publish-subscribe protocol. Presumably you could develop a publish-subscribe protocol with low-latency encryption support embedded in protocol layer similar to QUIC.
> if fediverse style apps take off the problem would just move to the most popular nodes on that network.
So suppose the Department of Energy provides a public cloud which people can get a network address to hold files for them similar to how they can get a Post Office box number at the post office. Except when you put a file in your own PO box the PO will make free copies of the file for others on your behalf which are subscribed to your PO box without destroying the original copy.
This would really just create a lower-level protocol or new number system for publish-subscribe content. It would compete with the other ARPAnet protocols such as TCP.
Tim Berners-Lee might get it right this next time around?