To be honest, I've been debating whether or not to publish this article. But why would that be a bad thing? It's always been said that the internet offers the best and the worst, from life-saving information to the most unimaginable illegal content. But we can't deny that a lot can be censored, including the opinions and information of many people. That's why Dissenter was created , and we're going to tell you a little bit about it here.
What is Dissenter? To understand it, we have to look back in time, and to be honest, I have to say that I did so by looking at this article , which I'm going to try to summarize. Dissenter started as a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome. The translation is "dissident," and to dissent, according to the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), means "to separate oneself from the common doctrine, belief, or conduct." Initially, the extension allowed users to comment on any content, whether or not it offered the option, and that could be a problem if the users were, shall we say, a bit rough around the edges.
After removal of the nation extension the Dissenter browser
Gab is a social network very similar to Twitter. Instead of Tweets, we share Toots; the first is the sound a bird makes (cheep), and the second is the sound an elephant makes. Its philosophy is that there should be no censorship, and we can all imagine the pros and cons of this, but that's how it is, and that's its reason for being. A few years ago, Google, Apple, and other major tech companies abandoned them, so they had to take the initiative and get their own servers.
Having learned their lesson, and with the extension removed from the app stores, the owners of Gab decided to launch their own browser, and this also proved problematic. It turns out that it's based on Brave , sharing its privacy policies and attempting to avoid reliance on Big Tech, but Brave's CEO wasn't pleased about a browser being created from theirs, stating that "Dissenter is just an extension." However, Brendan Eich can't do anything about it, since his browser uses open-source code and is also open source.
Big technology wants total control. Is it the only and best option?
One fact is somewhat surprising: all of Gab's problems stem from an attack. In short, Gab cooperated with the FBI , but they weren't happy that the terrorist used their platform to organize. A personal and unshareable thought: isn't it better to have an uncensored social network that cooperates with the FBI than censored ones that are unknown and therefore uncontrollable? Because what's published on Gab is public, so I think the problem isn't terrorism, but control and censorship. That's my opinion. For those wondering, "What about private networks?", well, they don't attack Signal, for example, the way they're attacking Gab—there must be a reason. Fear of certain information being made public? I don't know.
For this reason, its owners decided not only to use their own servers , but also to create their own web browser and other services like Gab TV , a kind of YouTube in which, in theory, there is no censorship either, I insist, with the good and bad that this can have.
And what does the browser itself offer
As we've mentioned, Dissenter is a kind of Brave, with an ad blocker, cookie control, fingerprinting controls, and, well, it's pretty much Brave in every way. It also comes with the Brave extension installed by default, so I'd summarize by saying that Dissenter Browser is a Chromium-based browser, specifically, and very much, Brave-based, with the Brave extension for commenting on anything that's otherwise unusable, and it was created to ensure that no one can throw a wrench in its works, now or in the future.
Is this enough to justify using a browser? I won't get into that, but I finally decided to write this article because even Mozilla has published a statement basically saying that more drastic measures need to be taken, so we can't be 100% sure that at any moment they won't try to take some step we don't like.
How to install Dissenter
Dissenter is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows from its download page . Linux users can get it in RPM and DEB packages, and its source code is also available on GitHub . If you use an Arch Linux-based operating system, it's available in the AUR.