The phrase "free speech platform" sounds like a giant, enormous dog whistle. Which is a damn shame, because I used to enjoy that place, and now I'm not sure I will anymore... Don't want to jump to conclusions, but is there ANY self-described "bastion of free speech on the internet" that is not a cesspool full of awful people? Just one?

I'm a white, heterosexual cis male in my 40s not living in the US, so this does not affect me in any way, shape or form directly, but it still feels just icky, unnecessary and tone-deaf. Guess I'll post photos of my succulents and my goofy dog just on Lemmy from now on, bummer...

This seems to be the reason for the change (jayclees is the creator and admin of the site):

https://ibb.co/48hY8fm

They also removed the admins who disagreed with this decision. Jayclees and Daniel are the only "staff" left now. This is a really bad look for them.

Literally why would you go to this website over Reddit. It has all the same problems and is just more boring.

"Free speech" is just a dog whistle and gas lighting now. Unless it's fully allowing illegal content, then it's not free speech, which is obviously sane to not allow. That's why its a silly term to throw around in the first place.

I don't understand what I'm looking at here? Some reddit-ish place is declaring free-speech then they immediately backpedal and say racist stuff doesn't count, and also some admins left? So what is the material difference between a "free speech platform*" and lemmy which also doesn't allow racist stuff?

Squabblr*

They had a mid 2000s rebranding.

Voat any% speedrun WR (glitchless)

Sounds like they are going to speed run what happen with Voat.

I wonder why of all bad things they make an exception specifically for racism and not something else like pedophilia for example.

I left a month ago because it was clear they were going this way. Glad I'm here

I'm really confused by this direction? The admin seemed... nice, and all of the users were "let's all be friends and be postivive x!" type people. Not exactly the place for "free speech" dog wistle folks. He's just going to alienate his entire userbase, I don't understand the point.

I hope people know that us all having instances would always be better than anything centralized elsewhere. 1) I can delete all my posts if I want. 2) anyone can make a better app to talk to it. 3) we got so many different ways of sharing our free speech here, it's not even funny. 4) you can backup your stuff. I'm not, but you can do that if you serve your own server. 5) you can establish your own rules or land on someone else's server that you trust.

At this point you gotta be a lower form of life to conclude that going centralized is good for anyone.

And this is why federation is great.

Somewhere for the Trumpers to go when Truthsocial falls on its arse.

so basically 4chan without the racial slurs

We’re “free speech” except these first 4 categories we could name off the top of our heads. There will never be any reason to add to this list. Adding to that list wouldn’t be “free speech”!

Well, they're being true to their namesake, I'll give them that.