Ask HN: Is there any place on the internet capable of freedom of speech?

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.

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

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.