I don't know, HN isn't much more than a focused subreddit (no offense meant!).

I could imagine some kind of federated Reddit where HN could be a community fully managed by dang et al. according to their own needs/wants.

Then you just subscribe to each community as you like. Much like you can unsubscribe to all the default subreddits and only subscribe to the subreddits that interest you, only this time you don't have Reddit 's commercial interests/standards hanging over your head with the power to shut you down.

Granted I'm not sure of the value (other than censorship resistance) vs. a set of fragmented, specialized forums we had way back when.

Lemmy is Mastodon for Reddit, so it lets you have a instance with a set of subreddits, basically, from a user can also subscribe to other instances' subreddits. I'm not involved with the code or anything, I just think it's neat. https://lemmy.ml

Thansk for the heads up, will give it a look!

I don't think dividing sidewalk ownership among many companies is enough to achieve free speech. We need something more.

ON the contrary, I think HN is a good example of the open web, a protocol based around pages hosted in all manner of places and links between them. HN is one of many places you could go to find recommendations for content hosted elsewhere.

Hosting comments is platformy, but other than that HN doesn't try to get people to host content on HN, and while dang can decide that HN won't recommend a particular piece of content, he cannot remove that content from wherever it's hosted (except by recommending it too much and hugging the server to death).