Hmm, perhaps those two facts are more related than Belotti's wording suggests.
They don’t differentiate from the dominant players enough to be considered categories on their own, the audience already has the desired views, and they aggressively moderate against conflicting discourse.
Parler was incredibly useful for uncovering the January 6th attack, however.
Eventually some service will take over Facebook and Twitter, but I doubt that it’ll be something that’s so targeted to the far-right.
Back when I was still on Twitter, I remember folks in the office were having a game to see who had the most bots following them. I guess there was some online form that evaluated the people following you and determined if they were real or not.
I'm sure bots have gotten much better at avoiding detection, but it would be interesting to see if these programs could still ferret them out as real or fake. Likewise, to your point, it would be interesting if the users themselves could tell either.
Instagram meanwhile seems to be, just give it an email on any service and a password, and poof you've got a new account. Post away with anything you want, follow and DM anyone, and no bans, locks, or requests for more info. Maybe they'll lock you out if you misbehave enough, but it seems to be actually hard to hit any limits like that without actually doing something they don't like.
Not to mention that Instagram is useless for business of not linked to a Facebook acc.