@daya @tinosoft There are two principles in conflict here. The first is freedom of speech: obviously, the name of the site indicates that it was chosen by someone that was extremely in favor of freedom of speech. It's unacceptable to say that there are beliefs a person is not allowed to hold or opinions a person isn't allowed to express: any attempt by an authority to compel a person's thoughts is unreasonable, and any person that allows it is a slave, and complicit in enslaving others. To allow your thoughts to be dictated to you is to discard your humanity, as is trying to prevent someone from speaking their conscience. To attempt to compel others' thoughts or words is an attempt to dehumanize. I cannot phrase this strongly enough.

Then there's a person's right to go about their business peacefully, without compulsion from strangers. If you walk past someone having a conversation, and what they are saying offends you, it's not reasonable to say they're at fault for anything. Someone chasing you down and yelling the offensive thing at you, it's reasonable to say they are interfering with your business. If you talk to someone and they insult you, legally (and I believe ethically) that's in the first category: you stop talking to them. So how it is that they're conveying the offense is more relevant than the offense itself. FSE's first ban was someone jumping into random threads to yell at random people: I don't see a problem with banning someone for deliberately trying to cause problems or spamming everyone they see on TWKN. (See Searle's paper on "illocutionary acts", linked in the blog post.)

Finally, one more note about the question: I don't know of a place where there is a blanket prohibition on "discrimination" per se. Hopefully I don't sound like I'm being too pedantic. There are cases where some grounds for discrimination are illegal: it is illegal to make hiring decisions based on race or religion in the US, for example, but it is completely legal (and in fact expected) that employers discriminate based on experience and skill. So I'm going to assume we're talking about the general topic of expressing opinions in public that offend others.

So, to answer the question:

> sometimes offence can be considered discrimination which is illegal and you said you don't endorse something illegal in your instances. What is your opinion about legality of discrimination?

Something that is merely offensive should not, under any reasonable system of laws, be illegal. (Please note, it's one thing to express an opinion, it's another to hound someone. I know I'm repeating this, but even well-meaning people have misinterpreted this before, and people that are less well-meaning come through and cherry-pick posts. It's always an indirect quote, though: they never provide links or even screenshots of things I have said.) I'm in the United States, so I'm obligated to follow the law in the United States. People complain that something on this site is illegal in Germany, and from an administrative standpoint, I care as much about German laws as I do about North Korean laws, Russian laws, Chinese laws, Saudi laws: I am pleased if people that are silenced by oppressive regimes are able to use fedi to speak freely, I am delighted if they have a place where they can say things that are illegal in their home country. All of my infrastructure is here in the US, all the way down to the machine that I assembled and configured myself and took to the datacenter. As a consequence, although you can get arrested in North Korea for disrespecting Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-Il, or Kim Jong-Un, the North Korean government has no authority to arrest me. Likewise, in South Korea, openly endorsing communism is not legal. It's a criminal offense to say something that offends anyone's religious sensibilities in Singapore, regardless of the religion you have offended. The Baha'i religion is illegal in Iran, and in China, religious texts can only be distributed if the government approves the translation. Publicly endorsing homosexuality is illegal in Russia. Pornography is illegal in a large number of countries. Any of those things will offend *someone*, but censorship is authoritarian dehumanization: you have to either reject censorship or allow the state to decide what is truth. The second option is already a catastrophe, but merely speaking pragmatically, very quickly after you let the state decide what is true and what is "harmful misinformation" or too offensive to be permitted, you will find that anything that embarrasses a government official suddenly starts being legally false. The first use of the legal doctrine of "state secrets" in the US was in US v. Reynolds (1953), and the government used the cover of state secrets to lie, so that the widows of the crew of a poorly maintained Air Force bomber would lose a lawsuit seeking compensation from the government. This is any government: if they can control information in a way that prevents them being challenged, they will do so immediately.

So, what actually is offensive? That's critical, because to answer that question, you have to decide: so who decides? And why do they get to decide? Legally, they have no right, and from an ethical standpoint, no one should attempt to be the arbiter of truth on behalf of others, no one has the right to decide for others what beliefs are acceptable to have or what beliefs they may express.

So, FSE policy was always that no opinion is censored. Threats and spam and things like that, illegal forms of pornography (even when it's in a legal grey area, like loli hentai), those are not people conveying their beliefs or exchanging ideas. It is perfectly legal (though obviously unethical) to lie, because, among other things, setting the government up as the arbiter of truth is what a totalitarian does. Slander and libel are not criminal offenses, though you incur civil liability for doing so. Similarly, fraud is illegal: if you say something that you believe to be false in order to defraud people of their money, that's a criminal offense. I think it's easy to see the difference, right?

So, if someone expresses an opinion that offends someone, what should I do about that? My goals for operating FSE were to make sure that it didn't have any policies that I wouldn't be willing to live on either side of, to push back against censorship, to have a place that was comfortable for me and for people that wanted a place like that but that were not able to run their own instances.

That having been said, fsebugoutzone.org is a temporary setup ( https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/update-and-roadmap.html#FSE_Bugout_Zone ), and things are a bit different here than regular FSE, due to active development. (And in fact, an hour or two from now, I should be done with a thing I want to roll out tonight, and it will hopefully not break the site, but it might.)