Andrew Torba / Gab (Gab.com / Gab.ai) / Dissenter (dissenter.com) - An incompetent captain sinking millions of other people's dollars.

Faster Than Chris Robin said:
^I take that as a tl;dr no

And he got a lot wrong, should leave it to those of us who actually follow it.
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He banned me from the thread because I (who actually follows Gab, speak with the devs, have done for a long time) dared to correctly point out he's giving incorrect information. Didn't even have a chance to highlight specifics.

Null's ego is fragile. He is probably very upset that Gab is doing well this year. Nevermind that I've spent 5 years being critical of Gab. A single word contrasting the erverrlerd and you're done!

Well, I guess I'm done with this thread then. If you want updates of funny shit they do I'll be doing so in other places
 
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Faster Than Chris Robin said:
Well, that about closes the book on Parler for anyone who matters.
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On that note, should we just make this a general alt tech thread? Gab isn't as funny lately. Parler is doing funny stuff but not enough for its own separate thread either. Thoughts?
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This should probably be renamed to "right-wing alt tech community" to cover Parler as well as Gab. Torba is absolutely a cow in his own right, though.
 
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Null said:
Andrew Torba
- Jumped on the Trump anti-Twitter bandwagon in 2015.
- Built Gab off a FOSS Twitter clone PHP project on Github.
- Capitalized on Trump winning to bootstrap Gab.
- Crowdfunded a million dollars by selling equity in Gab.
- Set up his entire infrastructure on AWS despite people telling him that this was a retarded idea.
- Ran into trouble when a shooter had announced his shooting on Gab.
- Was deplatformed hard.
- Ran around like a headless chicken trying to cope with the catastrophic loss of infrastructure.
- Crowdfunded another million in crypto launching a token which drew SEC inquiries.
- Put his retarded brother(?) in charge of development.
- Allowed Gab to suffer QoL losses over years because his brother had no idea what he was doing.
- Became remiss that Gab was nothing but 8/pol/ rejects talking about niggers and Hitler.
- Started banning pornography and "converted" to "Christianity".
- Tried to show the world how based he was by starting a bee colony.
- Killed his bees.
- Had a disagreement with Brendan Eich over BAT and forked Brave to contain an utterly worthless Bitcoin wallet.
- Made a Dissenter plugin which was useful for maybe a week.
- Tried to start a livestreaming platform, which failed.
- Dismayed with his dead gay site, COMPLETELY REBASED Gab off a fork of Mastodon (another PHP project developed by trannies who thought Twitter was too far right) and joined the Fediverse.
- The site became much better just because it wasn't his retarded gay brother's code anymore. Rebasing off Mastodon and joining the Fediverse remains the only good idea he ever had, but ...
- Was utterly anally devastated by the totally unmitigated trolling that existed on the Fediverse which he had insulated himself from by banning people who bullied him on Gab.
- DEFEDERATED from the Fediverse, pumping Gab content into ActivityPub while disabling Fediverse features internally (one-way stream of boomer sewage out, no Fediverse content in).
- Later completely disabled federation after other Fediverse node operators complained about his abuse of the ActivityPub protocol.
- Is launching Gab TV to try and grift more money.
- Can't get Trump on Gab because his website is an optics nightmare.
- To this day, pumps pure unadulterated cringe on Twitter because no one uses Gab.

Andrew Torba is one of the most high profile entrepreneurial failures and grifters to ever live. I've called him a modern day Timothy Dexter. The only reason he is able to grift this well is people are desperate for people like Torba to tell them they have answers to problems they really don't.
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LOL good stuff.

But I think that he defederated because almost all of the other nodes blocked Gab, so a that point there wasn't a whole lot of use being federated if you're just one node all by yourself.
 
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bwill7 said:
Parler has not learned their lesson LOL, still partnering with another hosting service

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It's not really a "lesson" to be "learned." Parler wants their website to be curated. They want anything further-right than Ben Shapiro to be taken out of the discourse permanently. This is another part of the grift now that they've earned people's participation and gotten some street cred for being deplatformed.

The whole point of a service like that, or Minds, is to keep baby boomers and normiecons mollified so they don't organize a groundswell of online support to elect a populist again.
 
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Null said:
because no one uses Gab
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Screen Shot 2021-02-16 at 8.55.09 PM.png
 
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He's using Alexa which is utterly worthless information.

Gab's had usage spikes in the past. They decline. People try to stick to the new platform, realize it's nothing but insane people with nothing interesting to say, and leave for Twitter again.

Carlgon McVaginalflap said:
He banned me from the thread because I (who actually follows Gab, speak with the devs, have done for a long time) dared to correctly point out he's giving incorrect information. Didn't even have a chance to highlight specifics.
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You had a chance and used it to say nothing.
 
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Null said:
Gab's had usage spikes in the past. They decline. People try to stick to the new platform, realize it's nothing but insane people with nothing interesting to say, and leave for Twitter again.
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They've never had a spike of this scale. They claim to have become profitable this year (we'll see on financial reports eventually) no other project is profitable. Parler leeches off GOP money, Minds has about two years left before they shut down. Fediverse devs survive off porn money.

These criticisms always come from people who have never used the site or haven't in a very long time. A normal person can get more engagement on Gab than anywhere else right now. It's not unusual for a post of mine to get 100+ likes and reposts and I'm nobody. Celebrities often get more than they do on their respective Twitter accounts. A couple of examples of that:
1613589461496.png1613589532730.png1613589591039.png

The idea that it's just some backwoods site was true for 2018 Gab, 2019 Gab. It's not true of 2021 Gab. People I know Irl use this site now, completely independent of me.

re: Fediverse (because that's the only thing you mentioned from before that wasn't just tl;dr kvetching or uninformed encyclopedic recounting that doesn't really matter) I've been told that the main factors in cutting off federation were that 1: It was being used as a vector for DOS attacks on a regular basis, and 2: Only 2% of their userbase ever engaged with external accounts (which is true, anyone who was there on either side will confirm. They may give excuses on top of it, but that's another discussion, and a good one for the general thread I suggested!)

re: Andrew

I'm not going to carry water for the guy, he's a ridiculous person and I don't like him. I don't like Rob (the former CTO) either. But the new devs have been nothing but reasonable and friendly to me, and I have a good experience there these days, so I tend to suggest people give them a second chance more often than not.

Anyway, all this to say, I just figured an alt tech thread so we can talk about all the goings-on in one space would be cool. I'm not going to lose any sleep if Torba has a separate thread too (I suspect it would never get any activity but it's not my site) but obviously I way underestimated the sheer autism of Dear Feeder.
 
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Lazy dude said:
I wonder how much time is left for minds to get shut down
There is less than 250 daily active users
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They have 250K active users according to some recent financial documents, their discovery just sucks ass, it's impossible to find people.

But they aren't profitable. Without changing something they have enough money for about 2 more years.
ditto said:
What's this about porn money?
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Pleroma development is almost entirely funded by MyFreeCams. I think Mastodon is donor funded but Eugene would make a lot more getting a proper job, it's essentially charity work.

Gab is most likely superhaxxxed right now. A few minutes after their Trump archive starting promising return on Bitcoin donations, they took the whole site down, and it's been down for a half hour now.
 
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Looks like they're back with some changes to account registrations on the backend.

They did a Hell of a lot better nipping this in the bud than Twitter.
 
Carlgon McVaginalflap said:
Gab is most likely superhaxxxed right now. A few minutes after their Trump archive starting promising return on Bitcoin donations, they took the whole site down, and it's been down for a half hour now.
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It seems that Gab is back up now and Torba posted an update (archive).

Gab’s February 19th Outage​


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What happened? ​

At 6:09pm EST Gab became aware of several accounts that were posting bitcoin wallet spam and related content. At 6:25pm out of an abundance of caution we brought the site offline in order to immediately assess the situation, solve the problem, and get Gab back online as soon as possible. Because of our quick action zero bitcoin was sent to any of the addresses posted and the affected accounts have been secured.

How many accounts were impacted?​

As far as we are aware, fewer than 20 accounts were affected. We have no indication that any sensitive account information was breached or accessed by any unauthorized users.

What are you doing about this?​

We have identified and patched a security vulnerability in our codebase. Our engineering team is conducting a full audit of our logs and infrastructure. We have also invalidated all active user sessions so users will need to log in again.
As Gab scales, our top priority is keeping your information secure. We will immediately be expanding our security and infrastructure team and launching a bug bounty program.

How You Can Help​

If you would like to support this effort to expand our security team we encourage you to upgrade to GabPRO or make a purchase or donation in the Gab Shop. Unlike Big Tech platforms, Gab is funded by people like you. You are not the product being sold, you are the customer being served.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. Gab is scaling to serve tens of millions of people in the biggest mass exodus in internet history.

Our community has been the target of state-level actors, both foreign and domestic, political activist groups and terrorists, and enemies of free speech from around the world for nearly five years.

Their attacks have been relentless, but we have done our utmost to keep Gab safe and online to facilitate the free flow of information. Our determination, grit, and spirit will continue to prevail because of the amazing community of great people who make Gab possible.

Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab.com
February 19th, 2021
Jesus is King

TLDR - It appears that a group of accounts were compromised and Torba pulled the site down in response. He is unaware if any information was breached or accessed. He plans on expanding his security and infrastructure team.
 
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