I think we as a society need to evolve to a more nuanced take on free speech where we can recognize its value as a society-wide norm while still seeing the necessity for curating discourse to build thriving communities of discussion.

If someone going to attempt to gaslight the debate at every turn and invoke "the Jews" as the central cause of the world's problems, I have no problem excluding them on a permanent basis. Whether they were trolling or genuine, they are a bad actor that harms the discourse for everyone.

You mean like on Hacker News as well? Part of civil conversation is boundaries and consequences. You have Gab if you're bummed so bad.

You seem to know what open source means, so you know full well that you can fork it if you wish.

Gab is "open source Twitter". This seems like "open source reddit" which, IMO, is more needed.

There's Voat, looks like a really welcoming place with plenty of intellectual discussion.

https://voat.co/

Eh, I checked it out and it's indeed full of xenophobic trolls.

I am bummed again that there are so few "regular" people that care about free speech.

Regular people do care about free speech, but you can't have a platform that cares about free speech that doesn't also treat regular people and xenophobic trolls equally, in which case the former tends to chase the latter off and take over like a cancer.

/s?

Very much so

Nothing, that's the problem of decentralization.

I know this is the common usage of free speech, but I don't think it's good-- I would rather people call it just 'Only not illegal speech' or something. Free speech, in the original sense, is only the government's guarantee-- speech is not something that the government will write laws for.

In private society, though, it's laughable to consider that that was ever the status quo. The open free speech market is a seriously toxic thing. Who wants to be forced to have their house be a free speech zone, where someone can always shout that you're a pedophile, they screwed your mom, look here for ISIS forums-- no one in real life would tolerate that. It's just a ticking time bomb of liability, going off every other week.

In the real world, in every society, people have cultures and mores to decide what speech isn't tolerated. Some are obviously more draconian than others, but insisting that everyone regress to 'Only-not illegal speech' just seems to create such a miserable, angry world.

Nothing stops it, that's part of the point. People should feel free to fork it and start their own site with different ideals, features, etc., they just have to open-source all their changes/updates to the code as AGPLv3 requires.