Squabbles, another recent reddit alternative, seems to be taking the doomed "free speech" path

I mean that is literally what a right to free speech means, so they're not wrong.

This is a great overview of the benefits and problems of free speech platforms without the immediate nosedive into the dogwhistle argument that seems to just be used as a thought/discussion stopper more than anything else lately.

I feel that it's vitally important that free speech spaces exist. Places to discuss "ideas that the majority may find offensive or horrifying" are important, but they aren't for everyone and they do by their nature offer spaces for "undesirable" people like holocaust deniers.

But you can’t keep out the second group unless you compromise your principles as a member of the first group.

The thing is that you don't need to and shouldn't "keep them out". What you should do is just let people ignore/block/mute them.

That was some awkward English, fixed it now :)

Mostly !succulents@midwest.social and sometimes !cactus@sh.itjust.works for cacti (hope I'm linking it correctly).

That is not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that every single online platform that I know that describes itself as a "free speech platform/bastion/zone/whatever" gets sooner or later filled to the brim with people spouting vile, deplorable and often violent rhetoric.

I can discuss a lot of things and accept, understand or at least tolerate a lot of opinions differing from mine, but things like "black people are sub-human", "gays should be killed" or "preschoolers can be sexy"* are NOT in that group. And these types of comments are inevitably what naming your site a "free speech platform" attracts in my experience. I think there is no way to discuss (or even just utter) them in good faith, and yes, I do consider people holding such beliefs to be awful - it's not like I’m trying to use the term lightly or to denote folks who like different pizza toppings or TV shows than I do...

Seems you're kind of a leech though, that just wants people to keep creating these sandboxed for you to play in. Federated means they are less likely to have to do all this work to rebuild in the future.

But as long as you get yours, right?

It’s also telling when people frame any and all discussion around anything LGBT+ as “transphobic” and “trying to kill trans people”.

The current gender/trans ideology isn’t just scientific fact that has to be followed and believed. People should be allowed to disagree and question it without being censored and banned.

That seems to be the point the creator is making - they didn’t make it to be a circle jerking safe space for only the far left “progressives”. They made it for everyone to be able to talk about their beliefs without being censored and banned, but one ideological group absolutely doesn’t want that.

Thinking everyone you disagree with should be silenced and not allowed in is literally what fascists do. It's what the nazis did. How very "progressive" of you.

Everyone should be allowed to express their opinions and beliefs. Everyone, no matter how much you disagree with them. The onus should be on you to simply not engage with any that you don't want to, be that by simply ignoring them or by using the built in tools of the platform like blocking/ignoring. You're literally asking for censorship of speech.

I don't think people really know what gas lighting is :p.

Relatedly, whether you understand the term or not, go watch the movie Gaslight where it comes from. Great film.

At least they have a place they can gather, and stay away from us.

I am curious why the allowance of anti-LGBT viewpoints is so controversial. As stated above, all of the basic rules of civility are still being enforced.

Let's say he decided to clarify that anti-Christian, or anti-capitalist viewpoints are not allowed. There are millions of people around the world who would claim such censorship is bigoted and narrow-minded. And they would be correct.

As long as people are polite to one another, what exactly is the problem with allowing people to express their perspectives?

It's bit of a stretch to jump from misgendering to transphobia what ever that means. I have a relatively popular twitter page that's filled with pictures of me dressed as a woman so maybe that counts as evidence of me not being a transphobe but I still block everyone with pronouns in their bio because I think it's stupid. Especially coming from a culture with gender neutral pronouns.

Many people would be surprised how "intolerant" big part of the gay community is too. Nobody gets offended if your grindr says stuff like "no femmes"

I would imagine a place shouldn't even need rules for that in the first place, but I understand people arent always the most kind they can be online.

I think also, a lot of what is called "bigotry" is often being subjectively identified (that is, one person thinks a thing is bigoted while another doesn't, certainly one cannot and should not always default to agreeing that every interaction is bigoted otherwise no interaction would be allowed anywhere), but I would imagine a vast majority of "bigotry" would still fall under the very vast "slurs racial or otherwise" or "targetted harassment" exceptions.

I dont know all the details, but its possible these admins may have been overly strict in removing content they considered bigoted to the point of being disruptive. I used to operate a forum back in the early 2000s (for reverse engineering video game software) and there was one moderator I had to remove because they were too strict in their deletion of content for a similar reason. Entire threads would be left graveyards and there was no way to discern the context.

I am only presenting my own speculation of course. What you're saying is also possible. The only way to know is to wait and see what happens. I think a big problem for those platforms is how quickly people bandwagon leaving when a small group decry a potential problem. It's like when people try a new game with a low player population, then call the game dead. Those people leave, and they tell everyone else the game is dead. So nobody really joins, except the bottomfeeders nobody else wants.

Good context, I didn't realize they don't have downvotes. That changes things a bit, the downvote is a fairly necessary mechanic for facilitating any type of serious discussion online.

But I'm still curious if anyone can rationally explain why saying "I don't like gay people" is worthy of a ban? Personally I would never say that, because it's an idiotic statement. But why is that unacceptable for someone to say?

There's a very simple response... "Why not?". And depending how they respond to that, they could definitely end up in banworthy territory. Or perhaps they might respond with an obvious misconception that could present an opportunity to educate someone on their ignorance.

How would you define freedom of speech?

I don't exactly agree. I don't think it needs to be political whether a person considers "free speech" equivalent to "racism" or not. But I do think it has to do a little bit with the currently magnified political divide.

I think youll have a hard time finding a person who considers themselves politically left that says "free speech = racism" I think that expectation is not fully understanding the context, and is rather reductive.

I think the issue comes down to what I mentioned before. Bigotry is a term that many people use as a shield to stop things they don't want others to say, even if it is truthful or factual information. Both sides of the political divide employ this tactic, but it is approached in different ways.

If a person makes a joke about XYZ religion for example, but a person of XYZ religion says that joke is bigoted, who is right? Who gets to decide what is considered bigoted?

The person making the joke may be doing so because they hate all religion, or XYZ religion specifically, or they may be a member themselves and think its funny. The member of XYZ religion may be overly sensitive to jokes or remarks, or they may be particularly prejudiced against the person making the joke. There are many reasons a person can claim a particular statement is bigoted, but there is no way to say one way or another is definitively correct. Because of this, any person that is chosen to decide this is going to be effected by their own prejudice and bias. And sadly, such bias has become magnified so much greater in recent years compared to the past.

Believe it or not, there used to be a time where you could have two people with opposite viewpoints talking to each other about said viewpoints, and they would walk away laughing and smiling, considering the other no worse than they did prior to the conversation. These days, people wont even listen to each other. It just becomes a screaming/silencing/downvoting/reporting war.

Judging by the number of downvotes my question received, looks like most people here prefer censorship over expressing ideas.