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Comment by moritonal | Hacker News Reader

Silly, but I've never seen an explanation of "Free as in Beer" before. Until now I equated it to the way you might get a free beer from a mate in the pub, but with the understanding that you'd get the next round. Give and take.

Also now really isn't the right time to promote the Fediverse's uncensored prowess, everyone's looking for the next Parler and every time I've looked at the Fediverse it's been fringe weird already.

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"Free as in beer" means that it is something you don't have to pay for; no monetary cost; free=gratis. It does not mean whatever the article is saying and it doesn't mean that you're expected to pay back. See Urban Dictionary[0], Wikipedia[1].

[0]: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Free%20as%20... [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/free_as_in_beer

Usually a free beer has an implicit cost... for instance, buying a friend a beer later, listening to a sales pitch, etc... Truly free beer is so rare, there's another joke that goes with it: "Free beer is the best kind."

I always thought "free as in free beer" was a way to make a distinction between freeware and free/libre open source software. That's how the FSF seems to use it [O]

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

It is. The article is a little odd.

"free as in beer" vs "free as in speech" is already such a perfectly clear way to distinguish between the two meanings of the word "free", that it boggles me that people still manage to be confused by it. That IS already the simple intuitive non-academic small-vocabulary no-riddles way to illuminate it.

"free as in beer" is not about "it's a way to trick you into eventually spending more so it's not really free"

It just means something you don't pay for, that's it.

Maybe another way to say it is "free as in money" vs "free as in permission". I hate how that washes the very last atom of color from it but I guess that's just what some people need.

Now is as good a time as any. The fact is the media will always be looking for the next Parler because it prints a great clickbait headline like "radical alt-right underground social network {discovered/deplatformed}".

Also they make great scape goats so people don't look closely at facebook et al.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the posts on facebook before the 6th also involved the insurrection.

Parler had 1.5 million daily users or so and I suspect a good portion of these were lurkers/observers and not users actively engaging in rebellion.

Zero moderation is not the way to go though, there needs to be mechanisms to remove posts with illegal material like child porn and the like or you risk blocking the whole network or make it "unhostable"

> Also now really isn't the right time to promote the Fediverse's uncensored prowess, everyone's looking for the next Parler

Given the precedent set by Google, Apple and AWS all synchronously booting a single company and platform out of existence, I can't think of a single better time to promote open platforms you are free to own yourself.

If not now, when is the time to promote uncensored social media?

At this point I can't understand people for whom the answer isn't hopefully never.

People never had better tools to promote their views in human history so it's odd to me to worry about that more than clearly damaging effects of that unrestricted freedom.

First they censored Something, and I did not speak out Because I was not a Something (and disliked it).

Finally, after years of pleading, they came for the Nazis, and I said "why didn't you do this for the first thousand TOS violations? Now the rest of us can sleep a little more easily."

You could make this same slippery-slope argument for any lawful restriction, but it seems mainly popular for speech and gun rights.

As with many other arguments it is far less persuasive to those who were not already persuaded.

Freedom should be unrestricted as much as it can be to the point that it doesn't harm anyone else, and we should be able to disagree with the billionaire CEOs who happen to control every form of media and communication

Is there any Fediverse member that's more akin to HN/reddit? As in, one where people post to some public wall (sub) as opposed to a personal one. They all seem to focus on microblogging.

Maybe they don't find reddit broken enough to fix (nor do I really) or maybe I'm missing a point.

The Fediverse is everything but uncensored--all popular instances have a very strong left-wing set of guidelines and will refuse to federate with you if you don't have the same guidelines.

That's the right of free association: you don't have to associate with Nazis if you don't want to.

I'm not advocating they associate with conservatives if they don't want to, I'm replying to the comment which talked about how the Fediverse is "uncensored" when, in practice, it's even more tightly moderated than Twitter.

Note that the mainstream Fediverse's federation isn't just refusal to "associate with Nazis". If you maintain a server and are not a Nazi yourself, but you federate with a third server where a handful of people said something offensive (and this got blown up in the media even though it was just a handful of nobodies), the mainstream Fediverse will refuse to federate with you.

It gets to the point where the Fediverse ends up enforcing a pretty narrowly defined orthodoxy not reflective of even many traditional anti-Nazis. For example, the Fediverse has a conspicuous numbers of strident trans activists in influential positions, and e.g. posting the sort of views that J.K. Rowling held (shared by many intellectuals who consider themselves on the Left) may to outrage and refusal to federate.

>all popular instances have a very strong left-wing set of guidelines

Can you point to those guidelines on the top instances? I'm not sure which of the most popular instances prohibit, say, expression of conservative views. Though perhaps you do have a point - they might be more tolerant of far-left views than far-right views.

I also think defederation because of lax guidelines doesn't happen as often as defederation because of users of other instances behaving in ways which heavily go against the guidelines - whether it's harassment or posting porn the major instance doesn't want, etc.

Fedi, moreso than Twitter, is what you make of it, and there are many (but just not as many) users on 'lax' instances (e.g. FSE or SPC or Smug or Weeaboo.space or Gameliberty... you name it) to talk to. I have an account on a major instance, a 'lax' instance, and my own instance. I have personally found I extract the least value from the local timeline 'lax' instance.

I'm skeptical of the idea that defederation-by-association is as common as another commenter here suggests.

I don't think it's meaningful to say a newspaper is 'censored' when there's another newspaper stand right next to it that shows every paper in full.

That's my problem with the fediverse, I'm more far-right that far-left and I find nobody that share my opinions on the fediverse. Until it changes to be more open-minded, I will have to find my way elsewhere.

You'd possibly find many people with similar opinions on instances like FreeSpeechExtremist, Gameliberty.club, Shitposter.club, Smuglo.li, etc.

There's massive diversity of political opinions on Fedi.

Ah, for example, these ToS are very reasonable: https://shitposter.club/about

I wish the Fediverse was like that. Since I got off Twitter I've wanted to look for alternatives, but, alas...

Depends on where you go, there's a lot of places that are blocking all these right-wing instances as they pop up.

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