I think it is a dog whistle , here in India there are people who openly talk of genocide , homophobia and what not and call it their right to speech and expression !

is there ANY self-described “bastion of free speech on the internet” that is not a cesspool full of awful people? Just one?

No, because awful people congregate wherever they are tolerated.

is there ANY self-described “bastion of free speech on the internet” that is not a cesspool full of awful people

When you have a "free speech" policy, you attract principled free-speech advocates who want to discuss issues rather than shouting down unpopular opinions, a few people who are well-behaved and intelligent but write about ideas that the majority may find offensive or horrifying, and a whole bunch of people who got banned everywhere else for being rude and disruptive.

The best-moderated such place that I've seen had a policy requiring politeness and high-effort posts, which kept out the third group.

The second group can be tough to tolerate. Sometimes they're interesting, sometimes they're a Holocaust denier who cites references, and you look up those references and they appear to be real papers written by real academics, and you know this is all wrong but you're not a historian and even if you were you don't have time to address every issue in this guy's entire life's work and you just wish the topic never came up. But you can't keep out the second group unless you compromise your principles as a member of the first group.

Why bummer? It's a great place so far in my opinion. The people are so much friendlier here.

I dont think most people care about whether something is centralized or not. I definitely dont. I am on Lemmy because it is afaik the biggest alternative to reddit with the most content. If there was a centralized version with more and better content I would go there

Most of them seem to be moving to discuit, another centralised platform, Lol

It's always telling when people describe a minority as a "political movement" rather than... people

"Let's have a reasonable rational debate about whether certain groups should have the right to exist! If you're a member of one of these groups, please be respectful to the people who say you should be exterminated!"

honestly reading this, it just sounds to me like he isn't cut out for community management. It is stressful and hard sometimes, so I get it, but he's going to kill his own site doing this. I did wonder about this before - it seemed like to me he regularly made changes based on feedback on a whim, and these changes were often rushed without much thinking. Needs to know when to pass the baton elsewhere and stick to development, but alas...

The last comments also speak to someone who's probably hiding some contrarian views of his own.

Shame.

Allowing bigots just means you are one. Rip squabbles.

LGBT people: "We have a right to exist."

'Free speech absolutists': "Ugh, take your political bullshit someplace else."

No idea how people think this is a valid way to talk about people literally fighting for their right to simply be present in public spaces without people attacking their very being.

Grand opening, Grand closing

If true: Well, that's the end of that platform I guess. Shame, I liked that there were so many alternatives cropping up.

Removng vovls s col nd trndy!

It sounds like they’re going to be allowing anti-LGBT hate speech, which was formerly a ban-worthy offense on their platform. Reddit and most Lemmy instances have rules against this, so I imagine Squabblr is going to attract the same sort of people that like using Truth Social.

There's a lot of context. Basically, there's been a few weeks of controversy over whether anti-lgbt viewpoints would be allowed. This post (along with the removal of two admins) was a statement that anti-lgbt viewpoints are explicitly allowed on the site as long as they avoid slurs and direct incitement of violence. With a site population that leans pretty far left, this didn't go over well at all.

I'll put it this way, there have been dozens of reddit alternatives over the years. Of those, pretty much every single one that advertised free speech has gone under from right-wingers, psuedo-nazi's etc.

The fact is, the biggest subset of people deplatformed off of reddit or any platform are truly just awful^1^ , regardless of what they claim about unfair moderation. And if you don't make it expressedly clear that you will not tolerate them, they will flock to your platform. Any claims of "free speech" even backed by "oh but nothing too awful please" is basically a dog whistle to them and they will flock to your platform.

If someone says something like this, they're either naïve about how this works or they're just saying it to maintain appearances. Either way, the platform is doomed.

[1] well maybe not recently due to api issues, but they're still a huge subset and will be the majority again eventually

This is typically done to allow transphobia. Misgendering people is not racist, a “slur,” targeted harassment, or an incitement to violence. So that’s usually what this kind of “free speech” exists to champion.

There's a lot of types of bigotry and other general nastiness that are not covered by that.

Normally I would not be so nitpicky with language but if multiple admins were removed / quit over it, that's pretty suspect.