> "Freedom of speech" doesn't mean the power to not be moderated by an Internet forum The amazing benefit of the internet was the solution to this. In network

> "Freedom of speech" doesn't mean the power to not be moderated by an Internet forum The amazing benefit of the internet was the solution to this. In network protocol that doesn't distinguish between different classes of network hosts, each network peer has the ability to publish on their own. Sure, there are technical details in figuring out how to run your own server. The cost of learning that or paying someone else to handle it is a normal cost of publication (which isn't particularly expensive). The point is that there is no authority standing in the way. As you say, if someone doesn't like how they are moderated on someone else's forum, they have the same ability they had to run their own forum where they get to be the moderator. The catch is that Freedom of Speech doesn't guarantee an audience, so getting people to participate is a problem for the individual publishers to solve on their own. Unfortunately, we have lost a lot of this freedom, and that loss is accelerating. NAT has created multiple classes of hosts, some of which cannot publish on their own. This created a culture of software where connections that should be peer-to-peer are brokered through a central authority. We need to regain the true right to publish - where network peers are equal - before these rights are lost completely. The imprimatur[1] is almost finished and the discussion is focused on how people moderate (or don't moderate) various forums, when the focus should be on making sure the right run those forums still exists in the future. [1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/