At least you get it.
Concerning Deplatforming:
This process, of a website being deplatformed, just becomes a recursive thing that constantly moves the goalposts outlined for you to ensure your freedom of speech.
Let's say you start a Facebook group, and you also have an official account on Twitter for that Facebook group.
So someone or some group of people with an agenda complains enough to get you kicked off Twitter and/or Facebook.
"Take your hate elsewhere! Go make your own social media site! " Good idea! So you do that, rent space and bandwidth from a hosting provider, but still they don't like what you're saying, so you get kicked off your rented host provider.
"Just make your own host." This costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, and yet somehow you're able to pull this off, but in order to run the site, you ask your users to donate to keep the site up and running. But people still decide they don't like that you now exist on your own host, and that you allow thoughts and ideas that they don't think should be allowed. They call sites like this, Extreme Freedom of Speech - which in the old day we just called Freedom of Speech - so they push your Payment Processor, like PayPal, and get you kicked off your payment processor, or your bank, even. So now you can't get money to keep your site and investment running.
You can see where this is going, right?
"Just make your own payment processor."
And it goes on from there.
"Buy an Island, declare it a sovereign nation, lay your own cables, bigot; just build your own power plant; just mine your own coal."
Private companies can do what they want, and today we have a whole chain of private companies that comprise an infrastructure required to support the existence of something - the internet as a whole, and then all the individual sites and users.
If "they" don't like you or what you're saying, and want to shut you down, they just keep progressively moving up the chain of infrastructure and cutting you off at each layer withing the whole of what is the Internet - the hosted internet.
This is the face of censorship in the modern age.
And now, you're at Poal. And it's 100% vulnerable to what I've outlined above. Just.Like.Voat.
So put in your effort and time into Poal. But know, tomorrow, it can be gone, because THAT is the reality of Hosted internet.
EDIT:
Let me make it clear. I'm not looking for ANYONE to give up. That's not the point of the post. But effort could be placed into decentralized platforms, making those better, where we won't have someone decide to shut down, or be taken down, and we, the end-users, have ZERO control over that decision.
Decentralized is the future.
I feel like I'm trying to convince a people who are completely reliant on public transit to buy a fucking car.
(post is archived)