Re: Who's the audience?
The question is how much it matters, really. Any public post on either Parler 2.0 or Gab (and I bet they've added Stormfront in their dragnet now too) will go straight into the data hoover of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force.
It might be that Gab has better OpSec than Parler had so the security services may have less data available to them. Though the 70 TB of public data that researchers had safeguarded from Parler before it was taken down should be quite useful to find a link between someone's old account on Parler and their new account on Gab. And considering many of the attackers on January 6th were stupid enough to document and broadcast their actions I suspect many will just have kept their screen name when switching from Parler to Gab.
On top of that, researchers explain the lower levels of interaction on Parler by its policy of banning people whose opinions weren’t right-leaning enough. That makes it a great marketing funnel to find extremists (and there is an argument that that was Parler’s main goal, to create an addressable market for extremist ideas) but there is some evidence that echo chambers reduce interaction. What is there to argue (or troll) if everyone is like-minded already? Quite a chunk of their target audience is active online to “pwn the libs/jews/blacks/gays/whatever” and if a platform filters out those with a different view then there is little to troll. It might lead to more radicalization but not more interaction.
Unless Gab can attract (and keep!) people with a broader range of views than Parler did, it will suffer the same fate of just being an online echo chamber but not a fertile hunting ground for people who are just looking for people to wind up.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
