Prof Douek says there are big challenges ahead for Rumble. Perhaps most pressingly, while it might not want to censor content, governments may legislate to force it to.
"We have seen a proliferation of legislation, bills, proposals over the last few years from governments around the world," says Prof Douek. "The big package - possibly the most consequential - is the European Digital Services Act."
This is due to come into force in 2024, and Prof Douek says it may mean that Rumble has to change the way it operates in the EU, including publishing more information about how it's applying the rules.
Rumble has already shown that it will fight what it sees as government overreach. When the French government told it to remove Russian state broadcasters from its platform, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Rumble refused.
Rumble is also in a legal battle with Google, which it accuses of "unfairly rigging its search algorithms" towards YouTube, which Google owns. Google counters that Rumble content is ranked as highly as it deserves on the search engine.
"This is going to be years of litigation," says Prof Douek. "There are going to be fights... and I don't know what our internet is going to look like in a few years as a result of these."
As the alt-tech space develops, some think the internet could divide further into political spheres - left and right.
Katerina Eva Matsa, an associate director at the Pew Research Centre think tank in New York, says that while people with different politics "are living in very different media worlds", there is also "overlap".
Pew recently conducted a study into alternative social media sites, including Rumble and six of its peers - BitChute, Gab, Gettr, Parler, Telegram, and Truth Social. It found that nearly three quarters of Americans who consume news on these sites also get news from YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter.
"So they haven't completely abandoned the larger sites," says Ms Matsa.
This raises questions about how separate a potential future alternative internet ecosystem would be, if its user base straddles both alt-tech and the mainstream.
"I think it's a very difficult space to pinpoint whether we're going into further polarisation or less," Ms Matsa adds. "We honestly don't know the outcome."
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