People should check out GNU Social. Lots of people have migrated over to it (quitter.se being the biggest instance) with the whole #RIPTwitter controversy.
It's entirely open source, has a twitter-like frontend you can install, and is federated across instances so even if one node starts with changes you don't like you can switch to another one and still talk to the entire network. quitter.se is moderated against hatespeech and nsfw...but other instances aren't, with ones like freezepeach.xyz being explicitally for freedom of speech. And you can talk to anyone on any instance from anywhere.
The banner at the top say's "shitposter's and conservatives" might want to check out other services.
Nice start.
The entire TOS is a marvel of blackwhite-style thinking.
Because "users who harass others" and "racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia" are "in practice limitations of free speech," we get the following, quite remarkable policy:
"Moderators can exclude users from appearing in the public timeline it at any moment, without warning, permanently or temporarily. Consider it a privilege to be published in the public timeline, not a right."
Did you just completely ignore the other half of my post?
GNU Social is free speech. It is federated across servers. No one of the instances can ban you from the network completely.
quitter.se /is not unmoderated and does not advertise as such/. It is one instance in the GNU Social network. It can ban you for posting hatespeech, and the owner (and the nonprofit company that it's under) has no obligation to host people's vitriol if he doesn't want to.
I'm not going to try and defend quitter.se's terms of service because I don't believe in them /nor are they relevant to the network on a whole/. Take it up with @hannes2peer@quitter.se, but there's really no reason to when you can host your own instance and just pretend his censorship doesn't happen.
It's more analogous to email than twitter: you can post to other email servers. People from other email servers can post to you. But your email server is free to kick you off or blacklist all emails from another one if it wants to, while you can move to any other server if your host is being abusive.
Please, explain how it's a limit of "free speech" to not be published. I had no idea the constitutional abuses The New York Times was subjecting me to by not running my Farscape episode recaps!
Who said anything about the US constitution or constitutional abuses?
Within a platform (such as twitter or quitter), the platform-runner is analogous to the government. The TOS (analogous to laws in a traditional government) can choose to value free-speech, or not.
What chafes me is the Orwellian language. To avoid "limitations of free speech," moderators can "exclude user's at any moment...without warning." Unless you're at a pretty advanced doublethink level, that is certainly not a free-speech-enhancing policy.
It would be more honest and less scary if proponents of such policies simply admitted they were prioritizing other goals.
It's federated so they can't just ban you from their public stream on the website. It doesn't ban you from the entire network. It's why they link to the other sites for anyone not interested in being moderated.
In fact, I like this approach regardless of the tone the mods at quitter take since it means I can spin up my own instance and block their crap from my public feed if I'm not interested in Stalinist/Maoist hero worship. :)
It's entirely open source, has a twitter-like frontend you can install, and is federated across instances so even if one node starts with changes you don't like you can switch to another one and still talk to the entire network. quitter.se is moderated against hatespeech and nsfw...but other instances aren't, with ones like freezepeach.xyz being explicitally for freedom of speech. And you can talk to anyone on any instance from anywhere.