What does the even mean if you can host your own
normal people dont understand how they can join specific communities or instances or whatever it is on the specific platform, they want something like "twitter" and then thats where they are, they dont want "some weird twitter instance thats not the main one"
The most recent release of phpbb was 2 months ago
I’d tell you to check out the “Twitter Files”, but it seems Wikipedia has been completely compromised. And I’m hesitant to recommend you read about it on Grokipedia (you’ll assume there is major bias), but it does seem to be the most accurate retelling of the scandal that I can find online. Here are both though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files https://grokipedia.com/page/Twitter_Files Censorship-wise… Twitter was worse than Reddit at its peak (before being bought).
At a certain point it's just words; what makes those meaningful? Musk bans and limits distribution for people he dislikes or who criticize him, intentionally directs hate mobs, promotes hate and disinformation, ...
(A) Freedom of speech is the highest value (that's applicable here), to simplify a bunch of stuff.
(B) Limiting antisocial behavior is valid 1) in any community, 2) especially when the behavior limits other people's freedom (e.g., by shouting them down or through intimidation or hostility), and 3) especially in the forum of a business that provides forums - they want their customers to enjoy the experience. There's some validity to a business with such widespread control of the public space respecting freedoms more broadly than they might privately like.
(C) Defining (B) in a way that respects (A) is the heart of the issue.
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I think the issues with (C) are realtively easy to resolve:
* I) Don't tolerate intolerance, to apply Popper (to my understanding). The social contract is I tolerate you and you tolerate me; that's freedom. If someone violates the contract, the deal is off and they're out. They're a parasite on the relationships. As long as people respect that, they can say what they want. That's how a free society works, and works very well.
* II) Relative power matters: Intolerance + Power = Danger; Intolerance + Powerlessness = Rudeness. For example, a room contains 20 Romulans and 1 Klingon: The Klingon expressing hatred of Romulans is obnoxious but can be mostly ignored (maybe don't stand too close), while a Romulan expressing hatred of Klingons is a serious threat to the Klingon. In a discussion, it's a good way to silence the Klingon. Obviously, you can substitute any groups you want in that room, and I think it matters who is powerful in the wider world - for example, the billionaire can go elsewhere and be safe, while the homeless person has little safety, little room to express themself, anywhere.
IMHO the biggest problem is people who seek disruption - trolls - being parasites on good faith. At (C) they see a weak spot in the social fabric and they press on it and tear at it, trying to maintain deniability about what they are doing. By now everyone knows it when they see it; the great majority can be removed with ease.
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> Old Twitter had banned several politicians including US Congress members for their views, sometimes for things like misgendering someone.
I didn't pay much attention to the issue - it was hard to find genuine (non-disingenous) information about it - so I don't know.
Generally I don't think being a politician gives you more rights than other people. You can easily have political debate without intolerance - without advocating against others' freedom. Do you have an example of the misgendering? A mistake is one thing; persistently doing it is harassment, an aggressive intolerance of someone's gender.
But the same goes for everyone - people can say, 'I think I'm either female or male, not both', and they shouldn't be harassed or silenced any more than people who say 'I think I'm neither female nor male; I'm somewhere on a continuum.'
There are always grey areas in everything in the universe, but I don't think these are hard.
The example I remembered was Jim Banks suspended for saying "The title of first female four-star officer gets taken by a man" in reference to a transgender officer.
On October 23, 2021, Twitter suspended Rep. Jim Banks' (R-Ind.) official account for fourteen days after he made two posts referring to Admiral Rachel Levine, a transgender woman and the United States' first openly transgender four-star officer, as a man. A Twitter spokesman said one of the tweets violated the company's hateful conduct policy, which prohibits "targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals."[30] After Banks deleted the tweet, Twitter restored his account on Nov. 5.[31]
Banks tweeted in response from his personal account, saying: "Twitter has suspended my official account for posting a statement of FACT. I won’t back down. I’ll be posting on my personal account for the time being … Big Tech must be held accountable!"[32]
Other stories there show I should add another criteria - safety. Dangerous advice ('eat rat poison') obviously should be removed, but of course there are grey areas of wrong but somewhat dangerous ('drinking a few glasses of wine a day helps arthritis'), of information of unknown accuracy.
Musk boots off and/or limits distribution of people he disagrees with. I can't fathom how you think that's 'free speech' - it's the opposite.
> Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed
I've heard that - what is your experience? Downvotes and exclusion? Are there more 'open' servers?
Fediverse has plenty of servers which are "free speech" adjacent, which most Mastodon servers close off since its easier for them to police what their users can see than let them do it themselves. The vast majority of them do not run the Mastodon software, and feel far more "wild west" with all the shitposters. But if you want to talk with actual hackers and are into that sort of thing, it's fun times.
They'll include reasons for the block, which you should pay attention to.
As far as reasoning goes, I think you can grasp how people would try and wield a tool like blocklists. A lot of blocks are merited, while some arent. I've had several blocks put on my instance from servers that I never even interacted with, for reasons that seemingly appear out of thin air.
Most instances of trolling can be dealt with by a single block, or reaching out to the admin, but basically no one puts in the effort to reach out if someone's causing problems (Hell, one guy even reported my whole site to my host without so much as a word in my direction, just for a couple inflammatory posts someone made).
And I don't think it's right to police what people are able to see and interact with if I'm running an instance with other people (if it were a single-user instance, that'd be different).
But hey, it's your server. You should do what you want with it. I just wanna do what I want with mine.
You can browse by software, whether its open registration or not, allows tor, etc. You can glean statistics off of certain instances, which is really useful if you run one yourself. Most of the instances on the other side of fedi run the Pleroma software.
Have fun!