In a surprising move, Gab, the controversial online platform primarily known for its alt-right community, has issued a press release stating an intent to change their entire platform to a Mastodon base. In other words, Gab will soon be joining the fediverse.

We are also finalizing a fresh redesign of the Gab interface. Once these two things are done, we will start porting over all existing Gab data. During this time we will invite Gabbers to beta test New Gab and give us feedback. Once Gabbers give us the go ahead we will finalize the transition and push it to Gab.com. All of these steps will occur over the next few weeks. Gab Press Release

A proposed mockup from the press release

Word of the transition initially spread through a passive-aggressive tweet made by Gab on May 15th, as Gab made idle threats to potentially reboot itself to circumvent being restricted from both the Apple and Google Play app stores.

Would be a real shame if someone forked @MastodonProject, ported over all Gab data, and instantly got Gab into both App Stores + made an open source free speech federation. pic.twitter.com/c8Znn7aI2f — Gab.com (@getongab) May 16, 2019

Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon, is not amused.

Remember that Gab is a sinking ship and they’re basically grabbing onto Mastodon like a parasite in a desperate attempt to get attention from the “drama” of doing so. Torba has no self-awareness to see how pathetic it looks that his master race ass is incompetent at making a working website so he has to resort to using software made by a Jew instead. App devs will block their domains, server admins will block their domains, and that’ll be the end of that.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time Gab has attempted to fork an open source project or flirted with some form of decentralization. Not too long ago, Gab forked the Brave browser and replaced the Basic Attention Token with Bitcoin. Prior to that, Gab made a failed bid to launch its own ICO.

In practice, many community instances within the fediverse will likely block Gab as a provider, as a means of shielding users from hate speech and trolling raids. On the other hand, a handful of instances like freespeechextremist might instead choose a more permissive path, and allow Gab users to connect without any restrictions.