this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2026
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What platform would you organise on that can handle the load whilst not being subject to terms where they can take down your protest events?
People managed just fine in the past. Word of mouth. Fliers. Set up a lightweight static website. You don't need 70k people to be able to press a 「いいね」 button or leave a comment. People can use text messages, IM, email, and their own facebook groups, twitter groups, or whatever to spread the word. You can keep physical ledgers of people you organise with.
There's no reason that a group of 70k people couldn't be thousands of groups of handfuls of individuals all working for a similar cause.
Since you're such an expert, why don't you start organizing protests this way? See the many people you can reach in the modern world without using social media.
The No Kings Protest is the largest protest in US history and likely globally. We have not seen any protests of this scale organised via traditional means before (that's not to say it can't happen, but you know how Chinese whispers goes)
For a point of reference, there were 8 million people present
Good. I heard that they are pretty milquetoast on the demands but I'm glad people are protesting.
There is none, that is the whole point. Who do you bank with if the government tells private banks not to serve you. Who reports your story if the news is owned by opposition forces. Who represents you if you don't have enough money to bribe/pay them. The system is designed to reward one thing, wealth.
No platform. Just ActivityPub.
So you wouldn't be able to organize anything at all, got it.
Even that would fall over presently at the scale of these protests with over 7 million active participants, and probably ten times that in online visitors
Why? They're not message boards.
I don't think you understand how it works.
E: For those of you who don't understand how the fediverse works, it's a distributed network of servers. I can host 100 users on a potato. Vested interests like Vivaldi can host 6300 users. Non-profit platforms like Mastodon can host a few million. Not that hard to match Meta's infrastructure when the resources required per individual are so much less, and is distributed across so much more.
There's roughly 1 million monthly active users across the entire fediverse, comprised of roughly 41000 servers
How do you reckon it'd cope with a sudden 70m users, with no other changes, overnight? The fediverse has growth problems as it is
Napkin math, we'd be talking about at least 35 new instances with about 1000 of the beefiest servers, but at that point the networking and federating falls on its face. One Lemmy maintainer estimates a postgres database for Lemmy could peak at barely over 1000 inserts per second, when you'd need 16.6k per second if the load was well distributed over time and much more if it varied by time
You'd be looking at custom software just to handle this one distributed event planning problem. It's well beyond the capabilities and resources of protest organisers to build an entire technology stack to handle event planning
You're just creating ridiculous hypotheticals. It wouldn't happen overnight and it wouldn't happen without any other changes.
How is it a ridiculous hypothetical? The proposal made was that these people now need a platform to move to, if they're not going to use big tech, where do they go? Building a whole new architecture and platform is a bit out of scope. If your answer is that there is no other platform, then just say that.
I just told you in the next sentence of the comment you just replied to.
A personal website and email?
A personal website to handle the organisation of over seven million boots on the ground? And probably more than ten times that in web visitors, without even counting bots and saboteurs? Bruh
Ok...
Are you suggesting that a Facebook group could handle that?
Web forums exist (the kind that were completely ubiquitous 25 years ago). They're a great way to handle a large number of concurrent conversations.
You can still use robust hosting solutions that can handle a lot of traffic, but the advantage of controlling the site yourself is that if wordpress decides to take it down, you can just host it somewhere else and have it back up the same day.
Across all the no kings protest events on Facebook? Yes? How many concurrent users do you think they handle daily?
Well if your hell bent on handing meta control, then great, do it that way.
I'm asking for one existing single alternative that'll work that's not big tech
You need it to scale to something like 70 million active user accounts
I gave you one, you ignored it. And it's not even complicated, it's a web site with a forum...
Please inform me which forum software scales to such a load? These are hand wavy suggestions that ignore the reality of the problem
You're suggesting custom infrastructure, which doesn't exist today, that they'd have to build out themselves. It's okay to just say there is no ready or feasible alternative
Brother, forums have been around for ages, they work because they are simple. You’re even saying this on the Fediverse of all places.
There's forums and then there's forums catering to 70 million people
Not all 70 million people are going to be using it at the exact same time in fact typically only a small amout of people are doing any activity at any one time in groups otherwise it would be impossible for people to keep up not the systems especially one as simple as forums. Its not as hard as you think.
Of course they won't be using it at the same time. Maybe once a month even. But even then Lemmy+mastodon combined only have one million accounts active per month, we're talking 70x the fediverse as a conservative estimate
I have no idea how old you are, if you've ever really used web forums, but they can be quite robust. This is obviously, clearly the technology to use. I don't understand why you think there's some limit, some ceiling on the number of users it can handle. The only limits are bandwidth and storage space... And with 70 million activists (as if everyone would be active on the forums, but whatever) with that many people, there will be donation funds for supplying the necessary bandwidth.
There's just no problem here.