@wjmaggos @jeremiah @Moon

> there should be a middle ground. basically no assholes.

Hammurabi, man. The big innovation was that people could know what the law was. There is no way to enforce "no assholes". It's also not desirable or possible to police intent. You cannot stop assholes, because you cannot enforce civility ("Non omne quod licet honestum est"), but you can let assholes make themselves obvious. Worse, you allow humorless dickheads to shut down hyperbole, a critical component of jokes. Worse than *that*, you'll open the door to sociopaths that will use minor infractions to silence others. The end result is that you end up with a sterile place run by the worst people and populated by people whose skulls rattle when they nod their heads: the rest of us will have fucked off to somewhere that we don't have to worry about that bullshit, and then normies will move in demanding that place be gelded, too.

> AFAIK freeze peachy servers have no problem hosting accounts that jump into threads

Nice Crew Dot Digital is big fans of the "single gamer word" reply train, and while FSE is still running Pleroma, my options are limited (my solution was to get my account instance-blocked :strangelovewant:), but self-censorship is a losing proposition. If people disagree, the solution isn't to solve it by trying to compel the other instance to enforce something that is within permissible behavior for them.

I think you have (again) confused illocutionary acts with mere locution. "Spam" is an action, its goal is not to convey an idea but to get people to do something. Here is Searle and I think you ought to read it this time, or at least stop publicly conflating freedom of speech with yelling in someone's face. You could also read the Snyder v. Phelps (2011) decision. I have also written at length on this.

> instead of silencing an individual voice, it makes lots of people not want to speak up.

I have heard this argument before and it is a bad argument (as well as a very old one, though the name escapes me) and I don't know if you were present but I've answered it several times.

If someone doesn't speak up because they are worried about what other people will say in response, their neurosis is culpable, not any other person. (If you are worried that you'll be spammed with shit you don't want to read, that's something you solve with tooling.) We live in an age where we have unprecedented ability to publish anything anonymously and get it read by anyone on earth, this ability is expanding (and I am doing my part), and this free flow of information only scares people that want to control who can say what. If you're worried they'll make fun of what you have to say, you have only yourself to blame, but you've got a worse idea if you don't allow any critiques (the irony having been lost on people that espouse "Critical $x Theory"). This was what essentially what Ridgway (I believe) said about Patton during the Korean War, Patton had spent a decade in Washington getting his ass kissed and his thinking had suffered as a result.

And, you know, you don't want to hear what people have to say, you take Pleroma, you write an MRF that stops replies from coming through. Or just enable the Hellthread MRF and crank it all the way down. Nobody can be tagged. You've invented a heavyweight blog, but we have those already.

> I want everybody as comfortable as possible talking to each other.

Well, you'll get no agreement from the CIA on this point, nor from paid government agitators from Russia ( http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_r=1 ) or Germany ( https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/german-domestic-intelligence-running-100s-fake-right-wing-extremist-social-media ) or China (YCL and 0.50RMB Army) or from other governments ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30528382 ). Tough luck, please enjoy the sea of agitprop.

The best you can do is converse with people that are unwilling to converse with people on the other side, either because they have nothing to say except political propaganda or because they are worried what others might say about their words, instead of saying it to people that are unwilling to police others' speech. You'll not have much luck convincing a dive bar to stop playing songs with curse words or stop letting people tell dirty jokes.
searle75b.pdf