Ignoring whatever views you may have about him and those he associates with, at the end of one of Carl Benjamin/Sargon of Akkad's recent videos on his Patreon removal [0] he starts talking about 'alt-tech' (Gab, Voat, whatever this alt-Patreon ends up being) and tells his viewers to join with him 'to essentially build a new Internet that _they_ can't attack'.

This has me wondering about the long-feared Balkanisation of the Internet. It's always been assumed that nation state conflicts would bring this about [1,2], but this incident has me wondering if we might not see it come about based on ideology instead.

With all the fuss made about how people on social platforms live in filter bubbles, at least those bubbles coexisted on the same platforms and there might be at least some chance of piercing them. What's going to happen if we create two (or more) entirely separate service ecosystems for people to sort themselves into on political bases?

On the flipside, maybe this is a _feature_ of the market rather than a bug and everything'll work out fine [3]? It might even lead to a drive to develop resilient, distributed services that don't run the risk of a single provider being strongarmed or being able to revoke service on ideological grounds that everyone can benefit from.

I'll be interested to see how this all develops.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXRx98gpuRY

[1] http://newdigitalage.com/

[2] https://www.rt.com/russia/446502-russia-legislators-internet...

[3] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...