I mean, who are we to force them to host someone they don't want?

Megaphones help boost speech too, should megaphone companies be forced to give them for free?

IMO the way forward is technological

Things like Minds that are by-design censorship-resistant

Or where even the platform holders can't see what's going on without user assistance

I would agree there

Although that has some way to go still

These things take time

I think patience is recommended here

Jumping the gun will likely only make things worse

it would be tolerable (if not ideal) for twitter to continue to censor people based on their political ideology if and only if the market were free and competitors were possible. so there are two solutions, each fraught with peril. one is to have some form of government regulation in twitter's behavior, the other is to force payment processors to work with alternatives like gab. without one of those two alternatives, we have to accept that the principle of free speech does not apply to the internet.

right now we have neither of these two scenarios.

I think both of those things is true, though

Anyone can make a social network

See: Gab, Minds, more small ones

What we need to figure out is a way around payment processors

Just because it doesn't displace all at once doesn't mean it's not competing with it

gab may not last the night.

We can get around thinks like ISPs, but that requires a community effort.

Tor/VPN?

Minds is a step. Cryptos might be a way to get around the problem. But they are still too unstable

still requires hosting infrastructure and payment processors

Really why are payment processors even needed? Because we are too lazy to write monthly checks.

gab is being booted from its second host within hours

I thought Minds had some internal crypto?

Or ship hard cash

I think minds does

No, payment processors mitigate risk and volume

Or maybe that is steemit

and currently its only sources of income are shopify and startengine, both of which are likely to be lost as they rely on the same payment processors through a middleman

TBH I'm not gonna shed any tears over gab

mind's internal crypto is a failure

But there's nothing that really prevents it from operating

You could e.g. host it as a Tor service

network effects

the value of a cryptocurrency is directly dependent on the number of people using it, and the number of people using minds is directly dependent on having a means of making money using it.

Oh I agree, it's a problem

tor barely functions as is

To a degree, but there are also other factors

putting something like a major social media platform on it would cripple it

What we're seeing is the intensification of those other factors