Russia 1990-2010 or so. We were coming off many decades of speech repression, and everyone understood that it's a treasure when people speak their mind. The Russian segment of LiveJournal had people of all imaginable political views yelling at each other all day, but when a US-based "abuse team" tried banning a few people for an offensive image, everyone saw that as a restriction of speech and rose up in protest. That's how I want the world to work.

I think true freedom of speech is an impossibility of the same vein as freedom of action. Your speech is generally half of an interaction with one or more listeners and forcing their precipitation is impinging on their freedoms.

It is also generally recognized that there is such a thing as dangerous speech but I don't think we even need to start including that category of speech to hit a contradiction - that said we can and should strive to allow as much freedom in expression as possible.

When you were alone with someone trustworthy.

Is this snark or is the difference between what free-speech looks like today and 30 years ago not apparent?

What people are nostalgic for is the ability to have semi-anonymous semi-ephemeral speech.

For example: The ability to have a private conversation in public without fear someone is recording you and can easily use that recording to identify you.

Out in the field, the crops don't seem to mind a thing.

The dog doesn't either. Cats, an empty room, same story.

Add anotger human to the equation, and my, how circumstances change.