Since red., DD Geopolitics etc. have been banned from the mainstream social media platforms after the stupidest US State Department announcement, I was thinking twice about joining Rumble. However, the biggest obstacle for joining was queerphobia.
PS: Might invite red. and DD Geopolitics to join the site.
Ultimately it is going to be inevitable that communists migrate to alternative platforms because the mainstream ones are just going to escalate their crack downs on anti-imperialist content. Branding these alternative platforms as "right wing platforms" is not going to help us in the long run. It will become a self-fulfilling prophecy as leftists will avoid them and these places will become more and more right wing echochambers. Meanwhile, everyone who remains dependent on the mainstream platforms will be forced to increasingly self-censor out of fear of getting banned.
The best thing to do is to establish a presence on these alternative platforms sooner rather than than later so that when the ban on the mainstream spaces does come we will be ready and will not be starting from zero.
You said it better than I did, lmao, I should have just read yours first. But yes, I think currently there isn't any blatant censorship or algorithmic suppression of left content on Rumble. I've seen plenty of Pro Palestinian (and, annoyingly Pro Israel too) content on there with a reasonable viewership. Rumbles management doesn't care, as they currently just want people to use their platform, and they hardly get advertising due to the stigma against them in corporate circles.
I have no doubt that if the tables flip, and Rumble becomes big and mainstream enough to start getting pressure from the US government and corporate sponsors, this will probably all change and it would just become another Youtube. But that hasn't happened yet, and it means it's still able to be uncensored.
That's probably how it will go. Then a new Rumble will appear and so on. The last resort of the imperialists will be to censor the internet right at the provider level, which will leave the imperial core ("the West") in an information bubble increasingly detached from reality.