| > No minds are "put in jails". I got banned from my city's subreddit because I said something once about crime the mods disagreed with. Now I can't enjoy a platform about the city I live in. I can't ask about restaurants, talk about concerts. It's frankly troubling. I posted something to /r/conservative once that asked them to be more inclusive of trans people. They banned me on sight, which figures. From that moment, I've been auto-banned from several trans and liberal spaces for posting in /r/conservative. I'm LGBT and my partner is trans. This authoritarian censorship is toxic and pervasive. It's just not right. Stopping the flow of ideas is how the pressure valves stop working. It's how polarization deepens and is how our democracy ends and authoritarians arise. > But they do not have a right to unfettered access to me. You can block me all you want. You can subscribe to a list of HN contrarians to filter forever. But you have no right to filter me from other people that don't willfully subscribe to your banlist. Lock yourself in your house all you want. You can't keep me from enjoying the outside public [1], from meeting people in the public, or from me seeing and meeting other people you've locked out of your house. Or even going as far as to say you can't lock people inside your house without their consent or knowledge. You do what you want in your house. But don't desire to make your house rules the default for all humanity. [1] "the public" is an allusion to a P2P, non-federated, user-first social media protocol. Something like email. |
Nobody has argued for the power to keep you from enjoying the public. But my instances are not public space, neither are subreddits.
If you want to run an uncensored space for your city, you can. If you want an uncensored place for conservatives, you can have that too. And so on. The reality is that no such places stay functioning if they are uncensored, and so the question tends to be if they are open enough that you don't notice.
I'll note we're having this discussion on one of the more heavily moderated forums available.