It’s weird, but probably none of their associates followed them over there so they could get trolled/gaslit/red-pilled on there with no recourse (because responses would get deleted), LOL. Shocking, I know.
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My first thought on such platforms like Gab and Truth Social, though, is that it’s a perfect place for the most deplorable of deplorables to self-isolate and then maybe they start conspiring and so I’m sure responsible law enforcement agencies would be monitoring them for terrorism. At least, I hope they are. I know COINTELPRO typically targeted things like vegan potlucks and Quakers and other scary sources of potential terrorism from the left, but…
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I don’t know about monitoring, but I guarantee there are a lot of law enforcement participating
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Oh yes, of that I have no doubt, given the way that white supremacists/Nazis have infiltrated law enforcement of all kinds. I view that as an excellent way for responsible law enforcement that is hopefully monitoring such platforms to have these people outed, too. Same goes for those in the military - which has many of the same problems, allegedly - that are participating - a great way for them to out themselves. 
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I think some of the fascists were hoping to make truly open, uncensored places in the Fediverse like GNU Social, Diaspora, Mastodon, etc…their home. However, I think measures are still available to those that don’t want to see all their attempts at trolling and recruiting, as well as admins that don’t want to associate with infected portions of the fediverse.
Certainly, I’m very free with the block option on such platforms. Also, their neighbor/co-worker/frenemies/high school/college mates did not follow them over to such platforms, so…they don’t get to troll them and I’m sure just yelling at each other what they heard from Fox/Alex Jones or whatever gets old after a while?
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Some people communicate with other people to learn, to grow, and to find community and consensus.
Other people communicate with other people because it’s hard to start a fight when you’re all by yourself.
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That was never going to work. In a federated system, fascist and racist instances/nodes and their users get blocked by the vast majority of other instances almost as soon as they surface. That happened to Gab when they tried to switch to Mastadon.
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They could still federate with each other, even if no one else will. I mean, the code is right there for them. I’ve wondered why they haven’t.
- Control freaks. They can’t stand the thought of connecting to something else that they don’t absolutely control, and they don’t play well with others. They’re all focused on being the Twitter/Facebook replacement.
- Commercialization. It’s harder to hit people up for memberships if they can slide over to another node that doesn’t charge. (There’s still online advertising, but if no one is the big dog, how much will that bring in?)
- User data harvesting, harder to do with a distributed system.
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In the end they just want to be able to grief and tr0ll and proselytise to the larger mainstream social media communities without being subject to the rules and consequences that big commercial platforms impose. If they just want to talk and fight amongst themselves there are already plenty of BBS’s for that.
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If they really were freedom-loving libertarians, you’d think that they’d be all over a distributed system that no one person controlled. Instead, they spend their time wanting the government to force private corporations to carry their posts. 
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I have to say there are quite a few of them gallavanting around the fediverse. Some of them try the “cutesy” thing to draw some in with innocuous things/other interests. Cat videos, anime this or that. Linux/FOSS things. Then they suddenly will post something that is just so fashy and then I might exchange a few barbs (they sometimes threaten actual physical violence) and I then block them.
But I’ve noticed less of this lately? Not sure why? Maybe more admins are being much more swift in cutting off entire portions of the network, even if it’s “only” other admins that are free-speech absolutists letting white supremacists get away with threats and so on. I’ve never seen it, but some people have claimed that child porn is a problem still in some corners of the fediverse, sooooo. I’m thinking admins have to be very diligent about that…that’s not a “free speech” issue in any shape or form. Maybe having to deal with the child porn has also made them wake up about the fascist problem. Or at least finding/developing tools to deal with one set of creeps makes it easier to deal with the next round…
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I think all the things you mention are probably are a factor. Also, it involves hard work and money and organizing skills to set things up and keep them going. Most importantly, though, I think it might be that they are so factional and many are very rigid in their opinions and very paranoid and seem to fall into a lot of infighting.
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Gee, you don’t say…
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There are going to be individual bad actors trying to exploit any forum system. The key to dealing with them is always moderation policy.
We’ve had all sorts of nasty characters show up here on this centralised small-scale BBS over the years, but for the most part they can’t hang here for very long because of vigilant and experienced moderators as well as an invested and aware community that’s familiar with every shoddy trick in the book.
Federated and de-centralised platforms handle the issue in their own way. A node that’s run by a free-speech absolutist admin is one that’s eventually going to be banned by most other nodes and also one that’s not going to become the home/main node for a lot of users. The same goes for overtly fascist or paedophile nodes and users.
Fascists always see any new innovation in on-line forums as an opportunity to get around the restrictions of previous forums or social media platforms and allow them to grief and recruit to a mass audience. They get away with it for a while and then moderators and admins or the systems developers close the hard and soft exploits they expose.
The only question is how long they’re allowed to get away with things. FB and Twitter were worst-case scenarios in that regard: large-scale centralised systems founded by freeze-peach absolutist Libertarians who cared more about money than about creating a healthy community for their users.
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Yeah, there is definitely a tension between fully open/unmoderated/decentralized and the other end of the spectrum - walled gardens/curated content, and pretty much has been since the time when the Internet was allowed to have commercial content. Problems in moderation (light or heavy? Does it turn into a personality cult/echo chamber in the process? When a tiny group wields so much power, the enforcement of rules become arbitrary and capricious and completely in the eye of the beholders. Something about gazing into the abyss here applies, I’m sure, LOL.) seem to start even further back than that, from reading things like The Friendly Orange Glow, which talks about the PLATO system and how it wrestled with moderation.
I just saw that Jack Dorsey laments his role in centralizing the 'net, which I thought was interesting.
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Curses! Foiled again!
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This site offers details regarding an upcoming book about the PLATO system, the people who designed and built it, and the user culture that it spawned in the 1970s and beyond.
Gah. For every book like this, there are probably twenty more that never will be written about dark history: Places where stuff happened (“in the 1970s and beyond!”), and then when the plug was pulled, there was no one standing by to document it.
The selection bias of apparent online history is massive.
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As our own moderator has pointed out, there’s also the factor of scale. Even if platforms like Facebook or Twitter want to actively moderate posts and users (spoiler: they don’t because it impacts their bottom lines in terms of costs and revenue) it gets very difficult with millions+ of users.
The federated and de-centralised paradigm gets around this problem as long as the instances remain relatively small (probably BB-levels of active users). Combined with Discourse-like moderation features and invested admins at the node level a fediverse social media network would be far less toxic than the existing models.
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Not sure about any good books on BBS culture. There is at least one documentary (BBS: The Documentary). I think that history and the people involved that could help to tell it are quickly disappearing.
