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

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

#1

Post by yqtjnvou »

When people say freedom of speech, they don't mean in its totality, but a portion of it. If you talk about the world's problems - all of them - you will get removed.

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.

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

#3

Post by ezekg »

The closest mainstream places I've found are X and the Instagram comments section. But the latter place is starting to be a bit more strict, and neither place are good for long-form discussion. Outside of the mainstream, look at niche forums or chat servers -- they're hard to find, but that's a feature not a bug.

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

#4

Post by LinuxBender »

Anything else besides hosting my own servers, and be killed by search engines?

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.

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

#5

Post by solardev »

I don't think you're going to find anything with true free speech, because that always almost immediately leads to child porn and drug and arms exchanges and loads of Nazis that no mainstream business wants to be known for.

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.

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

#6

Post by rsynnott »

> 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.

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.

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

#7

Post by fuzzfactor »

>Is there any place on the internet capable of freedom of speech?

>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.

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

#9

Post by wruza »

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.

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.

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