Secondly, my point is that if you do have a service that is trying to optimize for freedom of expression, mixing in needing to earn money on top of that, is bound to leave you almost penny-less, as advertisers don't like an environment like that and people needing to be anonymous aren't as happy to donate.

But OP says:

> Other places such as x/twitter, has some liberty but not very much. Real subjects are not getting through.

So I'm not sure if they're saying that isn't what X is doing, or that they're criticising X for not going beyond the law (illegally), or that perhaps they feel that some legal speech is not treated equally?

It may be their stated position, but not their practice, as has been recently demonstrated in Brazil.

I'm saying that posts get removed if they contain certain subjects. Nothing offensive is in them but only facts.

If I start spewing political speech on HN, you will soon be banned and dang and company have every right to do so.

Might have been true in the past but no longer. Once your platform gets a large enough audience, governments will try to artificially sway public opinion on the platform. This has been true for every single large social platform so far.

unless they are some local jack booted thugs…

https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/13/mari...

Private platforms and citizens can do what they want.

I am sure a forum where any and all speech is tolerated quickly turns to 4chan but with all kinds of extreme porn. I am sure those places exist on ToR. I do not know why you would want to go there.

Ironically, a lot of the forums which value free speech will kick you out for even sounding like you have the wrong opinions.

Another answer to this is "Yes, with proper rules and moderation, you can keep your cake and eat it too".

First off, have a rule that every created thread in this forum need to have some sort of "basis for discussion". Any thread that doesn't, gets closed.

Secondly, have a rule that states that any posts in the threads need to be at least somehow related to the topic, and posts that are not nonsense or off-topic.

Thirdly, have a moderation team that is well aligned, and favors quality posts, removing the rest of the shit.

The end result is a forum where you can discuss any topic, as long as your own posts also add to the conversation, not just try to shut others down or post off-topic/nonsense.

Sure, it will contain opinions you disagree with, but it won't be a cesspool of just casual racism.

(These ideas are all based on a real forum online today where essentially any topic can be discussed without fear of facing real-life consequence for the opinions you hold, assuming your anonymous)

They want 0 limits on their own speech. None. And that includes people blocking them. They want to have their say, no matter how noxious or unpleasant anyone else finds it. They want to "just ask questions" and "just have an open conversation."

But they absolutely want other people to be moderated. There's no amount of moderation of their that's small enough.

Basically, they're (internet speech) libertarians; they want to reap the benefits of a structured, cultivated society and community without be subject to any of the constraints that make it actually work.

The problem with many of these social media platforms (X, Threads, Insta, etc) is that they are actively disincentivized to enforce the first requirement of those two. Strict KYC is (rightly) viewed by many as overtly invasive of privacy, it would hurt the volume of content on these platforms (because 90% of it is AI generated engagement bait), and it would hurt their user signup and retention metrics (being ignorant of how many bots and alts are on your platform is vastly better than knowing and doing something about it).

This would actively lower the freedom of expression. There are opinions people hold that they're only comfortable sharing when they know it won't come back to them in real life, as holding such opinions can be dangerous. These people should still be allowed to share their views and discuss with others that disagree with them/they disagree with. This could be one of the only ways for them to even challenge their own world view.

If you're optimizing freedom of expression, then anonymity is a requirement.

I understand the anonymity argument, even from the perspective that sometimes you don't want even the service operator to know who you are. I'll be blunt on my take on this: I think this is millenial/genx idealism, tossing coins into a wishing well for an internet that does not exist anymore and will never again. Generative AI is out of the bag, and social network service providers can either grow up and recognize that their Paramount Number 1 service they can offer is some reasonable guarantee of protection against generative AI, or they can stay addicted to their juiced engagement numbers and play dumb when it comes out that 99% of tweets are from bots trying to build rapport, sell products, and influence elections (bye bye advertisers!). Its their call. Twitter is making the wrong one. Meta is up next. Traditionally they've all done bot detection; this doesn't work. Bots are indistinguishable from humans now. You need human-detection; KYC, meat-space verification. If you don't like the anti-privacy angle, then don't participate; no one is forcing you, and you're welcome to start your own mastodon server out in the generative AI wildlands (and, by the way, you should always have that right; i'm not prescribing how the world should be ran, just how e.g. Threads should be).

The simplest answer is that content moderation is an unsolved problem and certain topics are expensive to moderate. Freedom of speech matters but so does the culture of conduct. Further, as a site owner you risk your reputation by the activity you permit, and taboo subjects can attract folks you don't want on your site. Hence why they end up in the cesspool.

HN is friendly to freedom of speech because the site probably doesn't attract people that are easy to act out when offended or those that like to report people whose content they do not like. Or because of the occasional comment that refocuses a discussion again.

I would even argue that some more strongly moderated sites can often even be larger cesspools. You can go to Instagram and say something negative about the next random pop start or influencer and people are going to get extremely vicious. Far more so than a message board with only anonymous users.

Also the amount of taboos seem to correlate with hostility for some reason.

In other words, we're dealing with over-sensitive people on the internet? Children, because those are the only ones that cannot accept the truth. And, since everyone is so easily offended, they have to be protected by content editing?

No one in their right minds would spend a dime for an easily offended person. If this done, there are things at play here.

> Also the amount of taboos seem to correlate with hostility for some reason.

I noticed that too.

Mark Robinson's historic posts on internet forums clearly demonstrate the hypocrisy and self loathing and psychological projection that's really going on with people like you.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/19/politics/kfile-mark-robin...

At least Mark Robinson has the gumption to post that shit under his own name. If you truly believe and stand by and think you can justify what you say, then you should give it a try, anonymous coward keyboard warrior.

Everywhere that allows free speech now has an angle. Some hide it better than others, and people can't see it.

As you yourself point out, you’re entirely free to say whatever you want on your own setup. But what you want is everyone to pay attention to what you’re saying. There is no guarantee for that.

Seems like an assumption that “the people” don’t start producing crap when talking about politics/social. It’s a naturally complex topic with all sorts of obstacles to truth. People take simplified and/or incorrect positions and divide arbitrarily due to natural limitations. It turns into garbage on its own, no need for a sneaky party to help it.

This is unsolvable and the term is loaded, the faster you get it, the easier the life.

Just go with the reasoning you have, you don’t need to share it cause those able to pick it up already know.

This implies _intent_. I mean, it sounds like what you want is just a different content policy, really? A ban on politics? Would make for a rather boring social media site, I suspect; everything is ultimately politics.

This could always be the heart of the matter.

Whether strictly moderated or casually self-adjusting, once an extreme or somewhat non-mainstream "groupthink" starts to dominate, numerically or some other way, then any opposite viewpoints will be repressed to an increasing degree.

The best you can probably do is to engage where you are compatible with the content as it has already devolved.

As I implied in my other comment, probably the only time there is any chance for nothing to have devolved in terms of free speech, is if you get in at the very beginning. Or with greater certainty, it does seem intuitive, hosting it your dang self.

And, incredibly, it is.

Getting though how? Just because you have free speech doesn't mean others must listen to you, or that you even need to use specific platforms.

The platforms manipulating what speech gets shown is in a way their own form of speech. I think this can be dangerous, but that's more a condemnation of how we use those private services than the services themselves.

As anyone could guess, the result is ... edgy.

... Wait, what does that mean? They don't censor, except for the censorship?

What people normally mean when they say “free speech” is in the US first amendment sense, not in the “you can post videos of horrible crimes you’ve committed” sense.

Gabs content policy is pretty short and basically just says this. No CP and other criminal content, anything protected by first amendment is ok.

Free speech conversations tend to devolve very quickly into americentrism, which is fine until those with mass power try to impose their specific views on other countries.

In fairness, the US has about the strongest free-speech protections, so that kind of makes sense?

And you want to force search engines you index you?

I'm not sure that this request is terribly coherent.

Freedom of speech != "all speech".

A platform with heavy moderation is required to actually enable the highest degree of freedom when it comes to speech, otherwise you allow people to impede others freedom for speech.

Different jurisdictions have different definitions of free speech. Some jurisdictions have a right to free speech by certain standards, others do not. If your definition of free speech is a protected mechanism allowing you to say literally anything you want to say, with the expectation that literally everyone who wants to can hear it, then the answer is no.

In practice, you can shoot your mouth off about pretty much anything and have a very large audience—larger than, say, Thomas Paine did. That's provably easy to do on the internet today.

In that light, I think that peer to peer technologies seem really promising because it eliminates the technical know how and costs required for self-hosting.

Jami, Briar, and others come to mind. Retroshare. I feel like p2p is still in its infancy though, and the true easy, reliable, and private isn't quite there yet.

There is no free speech on the Internet. Ultimately, it is a peer system and your speech is carried at the pleasure of those who own the means.

If our speech is worth carrying, it will be generally carried.

Even when we choose to set up as a peer, we are still in it together with everyone else. Get too toxic, and they may just turn their backs.

Some say that is all a great argument for municipal networks, and in the US, the First Amendment carries some weight. Even then, free speech is threatened right now with cancel culture.

Discussion boards for these things seldom proliferate on the regular internet because of the immense amount of real criminal liability.

Rich feature set, ability to be ingested by other services (other M servers, Bluesky, etc.), can self-host.

I don't know too much about search engine indexing, but I guess in the day and age you'd have to find your audience by other means anyway.

Everyone has limits.

Even hosting your own server at home is NOT safe, because if you publish something that rubs the wrong way with powerful entities(could be much less than government even these days), expect to be dumped and blocked by your ISP.

I think you summed it up. One would have to host their own platforms and intentionally block search engines, bots, etc... In my opinion discoverability would be limited to word of mouth on chat and forum platforms until those platforms block the domain names in question and this is even assuming the platform is text-only. I assume the entry points would have to be ever changing and rotating domain names as landing points into the main site.

Any major platform that claims to support complete free speech will eventually be compelled to do otherwise in my opinion. Competing platforms, agent provocateurs and unhinged people will quickly contaminate the platform thus giving reason for governments to shut it down. One would need really good human moderators, automation, algorithms and ACL's or ranks to weed out toxicity in order to keep the platform alive which is technically a form of censorship and would not meet your requirements.

I use their moderators to see exactly what their rules are. Long-posts, depicting the situation as-is, no derogatory terms, and all get removed within 1h after posting.

Censors have learned that they don't need to deny people the right to speak, they just need to drown it out with infinite noise.

There is no simple or easy resolution to this problem. The only useful platforms for the free exchange of ideas must find ways to balance the signal:noise ratio, which is isomorphic to moderation. And if you ask, "who does the moderation?", yes, that's precisely the problem. Unfortunately, the alternative, no moderation, is trivial to censor in practice.

Furthermore, keep in mind that free speech is a means, not an end. Free society is the end.

>hosting my own servers

You might have answered your own question here.

Or consider that a baseline, and it still may not allow as much freedom as you have in mind.

Plus I don't think there is as much risk of a search engine killing a free-speech utopia unless it was a search engine that brought it to life in the first place, or was keeping it on life support beyond it's natural healthy lifespan.

Another question - why do you personally need free speech?

Because the population is getting stupider by the day (their doing) and it's being programmed. I don't like a re-programmed populations.

Check my profile and follow the link, the entire theme of a little that I have written assumes that a large part of the population. Head up: trigger warning for people who think some how the population at large can be 'educated'

Population at large = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2xlQaimsGg

You basically want no moderation, but for people to self censor because otherwise it devolves into garbage. That’s still moderation.

And this also presumes people would actually want to visit this site. If you give people the option of scrolling through funny videos on TikTok or getting into an internet argument with someone, they would not choose the latter.

You literally have far-leftists discussing with nazis, among computer nerds, among gardeners, among pedophiles, among drug users, among economists, among car fanatics and everyone in-between. Literally any walks of life is present on the forum.

It puts a huge weight on anonymity, and really strict moderation about the rules and puts quality above quantity when it comes to what gets to stay on the forum.

It's text only (with allowed URLs) which presumably covers the forum a lot better when it comes to people trying to take it down.

Of course it's not without its problems, which it has been in Swedish media a lot for, but it also has a ton of benefits in that it allows all these different people to communicate and discuss with each other. I think one big cornerstone to the success of this forum is it's really strict moderation of the messages.

I'm sure 99% of all the Swedish people already know what forum I'm talking about, as it is the most popular forum in the Nordics, but for the rest of you, the forum is called Flashback Forum and started as a kind of revolutionary fanzine back in the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashback_Media_Group

It is a really radical place (compared to how discussions are usually held in Sweden) so worth highlighting. Yours truly also used to moderate some of the categories in the forum so happy to answer any questions. Seeing the current atmosphere on the internet where discussing topics with people you disagree with is really difficult, I've been thinking about maybe trying to replicate something like Flashback but for a world-wide audience.

Ultimately, like most problems, this is not a technological problem but a people problem. The moderation has to be 99% right for this to even work, and the moderation team needs to have proper tools available to do their job, and everyone on that team has to be 100% aligned. I think this is probably why Flashback ended up so successful.

> This is because even if you do it right, no search engine will index your content.

Flashback is pretty much a "anything goes text-only forum" but even with that, Google ranks Flashback really high in Sweden. It's unlikely you search for anything on Swedish Google and there are no hits from Flashback on the first page or two.

For a true freedom-of-speech arena to exist anywhere, it requires a focused, detached, impassionate intellectuality from its participants, and an understanding/agreement that speech in and of itself is not equivalent to anything in the real world (speech may represent X but it is not X). This is a mindset and really a skill, and it is not one everyone has or even wants, and not one a lot of societies care to specifically nurture.

Individuals with this mindset can gather in places, but places really dedicated to the "craft" require heavy filtering, because this intellectuality is typically actively discouraged and often suppressed with great energy, so genuine "practitioners" are rare. Ruler-subject dynamics seem to be how large human groups tend to work and emotion is much more easier to guide people with than pure intellect/logic, hence the rarity.

You cannot trust yourself either: even in a non-totalitarian society where it's possible to get around that roadblock at great personal expense, it's quite likely that you may think you have the required mindset, but really would rather use the arena to vent things that you cannot in less free places; most likely because some consequence of your society's ruler-subject dynamic that you are in is A) being more visible than normal to you (subjects in a perfect society would not care that they are not the rulers, no society is perfect) and B) causing you discomfort.

Any time you are on anything other than your own site on your own hosting, you are subject to the rules and whims of someone else, no exception, end of story. Furthermore, you are never free from consequences, regardless, which is what a lot of people, if not most, mean when they demand freedom of speech. No one is required to listen to you, regardless of the truth or falsity of your proposition and they are free to react, short of violence, in a manner that reflects their own values and judgement. This is a condition of being a free, autonomous human. To have it any other way is to remove a portion of that autonomy from someone. Certain speech is curtailed by society when the exercise of that speech would create or exacerbate harm to some protected individuals. You might disagree with some of those limitations, but until a majority of people think the same as you, those limitations will continue to exist.

Those communities are typically on the darknet (remember that?) in unregulated peer to peer communities like freenet and such, and to a lesser extent TOR. There was a lot of shady shit on Napster/Limewire too, back in the day, before censorship technologies and regulations caught up. I think these days there are other places like that, but I haven't kept up.

Even less-moderated communities (the chans and old reddit) still have to abide by legal regulations wherever they're hosted/registered or risk getting shut down or at least blocked by ISPs.

So if you really want liberty, you have to exist in a network layer that can't be easily moderated by anyone. Monitored, yes, but not easily moderated.

But guess what... you go there, and the content is obscure, slow, and usually trashy and toxic and often outright illegal and dangerous and abusive. Turns out extreme liberty can bring out the worst in people (or at least daylight the worst people), and normies tend to flee those places in droves and go back to arguing about gender on Twitter or whatever.

I would laugh hard in someone's face if someone told me reddit didn't censor to a huge degree. Mind you, I doubt this will ever be the case as there's very few humans on reddit anymore.

About 4 months ago I was testing to see how many humans were actually on the site. I'd get >1,000 upvotes everyday, many comments but nobody was real. I don't know if reddit themselves do this to make the website look less dead than it is, or just other people's bots. Doesnt matter.

I was in a subreddit that was autism related, the person didnt share their gender or anything to identify. I responded to them having an obgyn as if they were female. They got extremely mad at me for misgendering them. I got an official warning from reddit admins for hate targeting trans people.

Couple weeks later, I as a trans person was talking about a trans issue and got a 7 day ban. Within hours I got unbanned on appeal. I absolutely did not break any rules or target anyone.

After reviewing, the Reddit admin team found that the content wasn’t in violation of Reddit’s rules. As a result, the content has been restored and your ban or warning has been lifted.

I haven't been back. Reddit is a complete joke. The gall as well for them to ask if I wanted to invest in their IPO at basically the same time as this because I was a big account.

Facebook? They probably manage censorship best, less false positives, but their actual censorship is still censorship. So erm... not going to waste my time.

HN? Worse than reddit. dont waste your time going to my profile to downvote all my posts.

X? Only platform I know that doesnt have much censorship. But it's not without. I couldn't tell you how many automotive mechanics who say tra-anny and end up instantly suspended. Those mechanics probably didnt care about us trans people, now they hate us. They see us as censoring their speech. Not working as intended.

It's an impossible task to censor without unintended consequences. Elon firing 90% of the staff and having the website work better was because censorship takes a ton of effort. Some words have multiple meanings. Sometimes the person meant to add a NOT or something but failed, their messaging being the opposite of their intention.

I would say X is doing the best job overall. No other platform do you have Nick Fuentes revealing to all that he's a nazi rat. A feature you cant have when censorship is in place.

Gab/Parler that's where nazi rats go.

I think you misremember what happened. I was quite young (internet-time-spent wise) when it went down, but I seem to remember the mass-migration to reddit happened when digg re-designed their website (to version 4) and it ended up crashing a lot, tons of bugs and removed features people were actively using.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...

But this censorship simply provoked people to analyze the censorship and it was way beyond. They were censoring all kinds of things silently. Shadow banning wasnt quite understood yet.

> In 2007 in the AACS encryption key controversy

> When Digg redesigned their website in 2010 the community revolted and used the platform to advertise a user migration to competitor Reddit

So while both seems to be classified as "user revolt", the redesign seems to be acknowledged as causing the migration to reddit. Of course, not 100% sure how accurate that is, but seems to match my own memory at least.

well there's your problem

Your post has a lot of political baggage - unchecked assumptions like "I want a free speech space but not the political crap" - embedded in it. Free speech is an inherently political concept, and stripping the "political crap" out of it is the heart and soul of censorship. Furthermore "political" as an adjective tends to be used by people (and, in my limited experience, right-wingers specifically) to complain about political speech they disagree with personally.

Absent a coherent political ideology to agree with or refute, I'll instead substitute my own political baggage and hope you can take something out of it.

There's a couple of different definitions of censorship that people use, but the one that tends to resonate well with hacker communities - "the EFF Consensus" - is that censorship is spicy packet loss. This is why we spend time and money on building infrastructure intended to obfuscate traffic from third-party routers as an anticensorship tool. This definition works well for, say, the Great Firewall of China and less so for, say, Kiwi Farms or extreme far-right blogs.

The word "free" in English is overloaded; it can mean both "free of charge" and "freedom to do something". The "free speech" I've been talking about so far is freedom to speak; but we also need to talk about the actual costs of speaking. On the Internet, we have "Cheap as Free[0] Speech"; as in, all the various costs of distributing speech are low enough that such services can usually be provided on an unmetered basis. The problem with Cheap as Free Speech is spam. The rules of market-based resource allocation imply that offering something for no cost means anyone can take as much as they like.

Markets are not the only way to allocate resources, but they are the easiest to enforce[1]. Absent that, however, Internet services have to invent other means of rationing access based on the information that they have. This is why spam filters exist. The problem is that, even if you're trying to be as even-handed as possible, you're going to fuck up and people aren't going to agree with every one of your filtering choices. This can read as censorship, because it kind of is, but it's also necessary for any of these services to work at all.

The alternative - of not doing any sort of filtering - does not create a working platform. At the very least, nobody can speak because they are being talked over by spam. This is a paradoxical "censorship by free speech".

Anyway, I have a pet theory about Nazi bars.

The canonical explanation of the "Nazi bar" is that a platform with no moderation or an "apolitical" moderation policy will inevitably become far-right. You see, the far-right does not believe in or respect freedom of speech[2], they just see it as a stepping stone to seizing control. If they feel welcomed, everyone else leaves, either preemptively or reactively.

My hunch is that most Nazi bars actually, y'know, decide to become Nazi bars. Because it's profitable. Nazis are whales. i.e. Donald Trump did not merely show up one day on Twitter, start pushing far-right ideology, and not get pushed out. Twitter management (a decade ago) saw Trump doing numbers on the platform and actively decided to give him special permissions and privileges[3]. Same goes for a lot of other far-right influencers; who spent a good decade radicalizing the rich into becoming far-right influencers.

Of course, pre-Musk Twitter did not merely want to become a Nazi bar. They also wanted to become a Tankie Bar, a Libertarian Bar, an Anarchist Bar, a Zionist bar, an Islamist bar, a Christian Nationalist bar, etc. The very loudmouthed "anti-censorship" platforms (i.e. Gab) are more explicitly Nazis only; like I'm pretty sure I'd get banned off Gab or Truth Social if I started posting left-libertarian stuff there.

The underlying idea is that...

- Online platforms have to have moderation, or they don't work at all;

- There are a lot of people who want to create online platforms to push their own ideology, some of which get mislabeled as "free speech";

- and all platforms have profit incentives to amplify extremist voices.

The political baggage I'm referring to is that you appear to have bought into the kind of "free speech" that the far-right likes. That is, nothing stopping them from calling for the censorship of others. This is destructive to actual efforts to fight censorship.

[0] http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/Cheap_as_Free

[1] Related historical point: the transition to money economies happens specifically because of the need of conquering armies to track taxation.

[2] Which is why I don't consider it censorship when they get censored. Pick a political ideology that does not blatantly violate the 1st Amendment, then I will defend your right to speak with my life.

[3] i.e. the World Leaders Policy

Freedom of speech is when you see a problem and describe it exactly as what it is; no exceptions. Translate this into your long-post and come up with a single sentence to address it.

Oh, we also still have RSS on many sites, not that much, not with complete articles, but enough to being able to follow news from various sources without third party scoring/recommendation systems filters.

People say stupid shit. When you have a place where anyone can publish anything, you wind up with a lot of people publishing a lot of stuff you don't like.

You don't get to decide what sort of discourse or ideas are getting published. Nobody does. That's just part and parcel. You can block people, ignore people, but networks have their character.

The best network IMO for free speech is nostr. There are no controlled or verified identities, censorship is almost impossible. But it has it's character. The content there is the content there. It's mostly bitcoiners. Go use it stand talk about other things if you don't like that aspect.

I like everything pure. Stupidity is part of life; if the people are stupid, then we have a duty to teach them not to be so, instead of silencing them; wouldn't you agree?

The world is screwed up because everyone looks only to their bellies and their genitals - that's all. The foundation of consumption is based on this and everything evil is as well. I would like for people to think before they act; if they did so, bellies and genitals would no longer represent a factor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twister_(software)

If a thing is totally unmoderated it becomes a vector for spam; if it is centralized in any respect it becomes a vector for lawsuits/legal warfare/deplatforming (internet services, banking, even postal services!). If you somehow manage to pass through those gates, it becomes a vector for state-sponsored cognitive-warfare/psy-op campaigns.