Squabblr now officially a "free speech" cesspool, admins removed or forced out by owner

A ton of people flocked there because they think the Fediverse is too confusing, so now they're going to Discuit.

I have accounts on both out of curiosity, but I had a feeling something weird was going to go down on Squabblr. I just got a weird vibe from that place at first. I am not sure about Discuit yet, but it's yet another centralized service people are using because the fediverse is "too confusing"...

Funny, during the boycott of Reddit when squabbles was growing, I signed up and created two new communities - one for earbuds and one for vaporents (dry herbal vaporizing).

My earbuds community was quicky approved, but the vaporents group took almost a week before it was approved. It's almost like the site's owner (since back then he had no mods or admin team) was hesitant when it came to something possibly clandestine in nature. I guess drugs aren't cool, but hate speech is?

Sucks. We had lots of fun there when it first started. But I've deleted my account now. It's hilarious to watch Jake try and make an empire. What a loser.

Wtf is a squabblr

I've legit never heard of Squabblr or this... Discuit? What even are these?

It's already falling apart and I haven't even heard of it. Sounds about right when it comes to chats and social networks these days.

This is why non-federated services are crap.

Have they learned nothing from the failure of Voat?

“Let’s copy Twitter and Parler, those are soo successful!”

Permanently Deleted

The sole motive behind transforming a three-month-old online forum into a "Limited Liability Company", which they did, appears to stem from either intentions of selling it or the reception of funding, consequently relinquishing your authority over it.

It's starting to worry me that "free speech" has become something to be feared and avoided. Avoiding confrontation to your beliefs just makes you and your beliefs weaker.

Since "free speech" is a dogwhistle, what should a hypothetical place actually interested in free speech as more than just a bigotry shield call what they're trying to do? Some place interested in allowing discussion of objectionable topics without bigotry?

Yes, whatever, those don't exist anywhere, you don't need to respond with that tidbit. Humor the hypothetical here.

I may not be onto anything here, this may just be a coincidence. However, the timing of these two events are suspicious.

1: Squabbles.io rebrands to squabblr.co. The .io domain explicitly forbids anything that may be considered illegal by any country. The site could be shut down if this is violated. You know what would be considered hate speech by some countries, such as Canada? Discrimination of someone based on their gender identity, ie trans people.

2: Squabblr rebrands to a “free speech” website and removes all explicit mention of LGBT+ being protected under their ToS. Within microseconds (slight exaggeration, but within less than 24 hours) people are chiming in with the “trans women are not women” statements.

Was that planned, or just extremely unfortunate timing?

Here I go deleting an account, sigh, I liked the platform there

what the fuck is squabbler?

The sole dev of Squabblr (Jayclees) really needs to hire someone to do the community management/PR side of things. He is great at programming but he keeps making snap top-down decisions that go against what the userbase wants. And his use of language (i.e., "free speech platform") sounds like a fkn dog whistle.

All these big names on Squabblr going to Discuit like the devs can't do the exact same thing over there. I'm tired of migrating platforms. If Lemmy doesn't work out, then I'm going to just go touch grass for fun.

IMO if sites want to take a "free speech" approach without allowing bigots, maybe they should adopt the Canadian law. We don't have free speech, we have what's known as "freedom of expression". Essentially, we can say whatever unless it's hate speech or bigoted.

Yeah, Canada has censorship, but it's essentially just to censor racist idiots and homophobic fools.

I mean I don't care for most of the "free speech" sites because I don't care for the content that's posted to them. In addition of never heard of Squabblr. But lets not be hypocrites here, the normal line is: "It's a private company." This also applies for companies you don't like. Not just when a major platform bans people you disagree with in the name of reducing "toxicity" (a completely nebulous term that could be used to describe anything you don't like.) They can do whatever they want. If you don't like it, don't use the site. Simple as.

Didn't they realise that Gab, Voat and Poal already exist?

I used the site for a bit. It had some serious potential as a reddit alternative, and was poised perfectly to reap the benefits of a mass exodus. Of course, I used it when it was called Squabbles less than a week ago, before the cringy name change to drop a vowel to be more like the websites from the early 2010's. I think the biggest hurdle for them was that they were a .io domain and couldn't host pornographic material, so the porn subreddits couldn't use the platform even if they wanted to. I think they recently switched to .co, so that might change, who knows.

I'm not sure I agree with the owner's top-down approach to website design and management. I had no idea about his anti-LGBTQ opinions until now, but that's one more reason to not to continue using it, aside from the fact that growth is basically reversing and very little OC is being posted.

When I hear "free speech purism", I immediately think that either the person/people who want that don't know the dark forces they are inviting, or worse, they do know and they want it to happen. Neither of those are a good look. Some speech absolutely should be banned from these websites for obvious reasons. People who conflate freedom of speech for consequence-free speech are idiots who deserve to be banned from everything everywhere.

I'm surprised it took Jayclees this long to remove his mask.

Based. Thanks for letting me know about this OP, will definitely check it out.

So everyone is now against Free Speech I see, what a shame.