I got myself a Parler account just in time for Parler to be shut down at might-night tonight. I even managed to get around the mobile phone requirement by using a fake number and clicking “skip” at the right moment.
If you wonder what happened I. came across this meme and it explains the situations quite perfectly. A few month ago another free speech social media appeared and was hyped and now it get's deplatformed by Apple, Google and Amazon. I'm only surprised it took that long.
Parler already announced they have a prepared and will be back in a week. Well, If it takes a week it's not the best of backup plans. Proper preparation would be a federated or decentralised solution so they are back online in less than a day. And those solutions already exist.
GAB switched to a federated solution on the base of Mastodon after being deplatformed multiple times.
And then there are the blockchain based social media like SteemIt, Hive, Blurt and Whaleshares.
The blockchain, the backbone of those networks are run by at least 20 witnesses which can be distributed to volunteers all over the world. The middleware too can be distributed to multiple volunteers and you can run them with multiple front end like SteemPeak and PeakD.
And all of this are open source. All of this can be easily adapted to once needs. Parler could have just adapted a tried and tested censor prove technology instead of developing their own which is now offline for a week.
Update 1: It seems that in addition to using a big tech hosting provider (Amazon Web Services) Parler also made the mistake to use commercial software for user management for which they only had a trial licence. The company in question has revoked the trial and. How naive was that?
Update 2: It also seems that Parler didn't strip EXIF data from uploaded pictures as well as not preventing access to the raw data of uploaded videos. For a free speech site these are inexcusable mistakes. Parler was far too naive and unprepared to the trials and tribulations of a free speech social media.
Even if they manage to come back online I won't be using them again. Better use a tried and testes service like Minds or GAB. Or use a blockchain based social media where I know from the get go that everything I post will be out there forever.
these apps need those big tech companies, we lit can operate on anything, we used on all that bs. I also thing censoring and KYC are bs