The places that aren't moderated are filled with political crap such as to tarnish their credibility, so that the people will stay away by their own will.
Other places such as x/twitter, has some liberty but not very much. Real subjects are not getting through.
Anything else besides hosting my own servers, and be killed by search engines? This is because even if you do it right, no search engine will index your content. I'm looking for solutions of anything other that the usual "let them kill each other", which is exactly what they are doing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As anyone could guess, the result is ... edgy.
And you want to force search engines you index you?
I'm not sure that this request is terribly coherent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone has limits.
Discussion boards for these things seldom proliferate on the regular internet because of the immense amount of real criminal liability.
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.
>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.
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.
Another question - why do you personally need free speech?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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