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@ vinney
2025-04-27 02:19:33
no disagreement whatsoever that X and any other platform can and do prevent people from seeing others' content. they do that for a lot of different reasons - all of which I disagree with - and they only have the ability to do it because the users make the original error of domiciling "their data" with someone else.
this is why I don't have accounts with those things.
the story isn't quite so clear though when the question isn't just "does this centralized platform fuck around with who gets to see what inside their playground?" but instead "onto how many other servers do you copy your stuff, how many of those do you own, which of those have their own subtle rules about moderation and access, what NIPs do they support, what kind of performance and scale do they possess, how many other people are connected to which ones, etc etc." It's an unanswerable complex.
this is a good thing.
to me, there are as many different pictures of "reach" in that complex as there are combinations of people, notes and infrastructure pieces.
in one permutation, a certain message may only be visible to 20 people due to some simple constraints. in another, almost **everyone** paying attention to the protocol may see a particular note.
the concept of free speech is not nonsensical and it is directly related to the above. the presence of an open protocol **is** the existence proof / what defines free speech. I CAN construct a message that conforms to a particular Kind, documented at a particular commit. nobody can stop me from forming that message. that's free speech. granted it's sort of weak and useless without reach, but its existence as a base fact makes all the difference because it can become a Schelling point. (and has. look around).
not everything is like that. I may not be able to arrange bytes in a way that conforms to some proprietary format because I don't know the rules and don't have the tools - because these things are secret. that won't become a schelling point for anyone *outside* the special inner circle. It's not an open protocol because nobody is free to create that kind of speech.
once you have the basic component of that kind of permissionless speech, you can get schelling points via persuasion and value-adds, and aligned individuals and groups build voluntary reach channels as befit their goals and interests together. very many of these grow and evolve organically and eventually you have the complex I described above.
I'm not sure what we're disagreeing about, if anything.