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Why a conservative social network would fail
“Most people are not primarily political animals, not even now, in the age of Trump. Instagram has become a runaway success precisely because it contains almost zero political content. Almost nobody wants to join an explicitly political social network. There’s no sport in spreading right-wing memes without triggering the libs. That’s the whole point! If the right abandoned Twitter and Facebook, it would lose its ability to complain about censorship. It would be much easier, then, for the platforms to say”if you don’t like it here, why don’t you just leave”. Financially, a new political social network is a non-starter. Many people have tried to create alternatives to Twitter and Facebook (remember Ello? Peach? Mastodon?); none of them have got off the ground, because they can’t reach the necessary scale. That includes Gab, a Twitter for conservatives which has failed to create traction.”
Felix Salmon