>it's not trying to be a true freedom of speech site

I spoke of this in the chatroom previously, so I will mirror my musings here:

What people so often misunderstand about internet freedom of speech stems from a misunderstanding of the internet in general. The internet is not a centralised entity owned by a ruling cabal, despite some orgs trying to make it such. It is a collection of interacting networks which can, in theory, work without any state, corporate, or other powerful structures' input. Most people, admittedly, already know this. But when discussion of the internet comes up, I am still faced with people who seemingly forget the importance of internet as an infrastructure rather than its services.

Internet freedom of speech comes from the infrastructure, not individual hosts. It is not every webforum and recipe site's task to enforce "tr00 freeze peach d00d" and get perpetually fucked in the ass by low quality spam. It is not their task to do anything at all, really! The webforum can freely ban spammers, the underage, and everything in between. The recipe site could ban racial minorities from their guestbook, if they really wanted!

This, in essence, is internet freedom of speech. One can easily make a site of their own and enforce whatever rules—or lack thereof—they wish. If you are unhappy with a forum with rules you believe are too strict, install SQL and some software on a box and do one better. For better or for worse, it was this mindset that compelled a certain Futaba lurking otaku to make his own Japanese-style BBS board after getting fussy at another web admin's anime bans.

Thinking that every site must conform to a strictly tr00 freeze peach style is a bit draconian itself, is it not? That every site must enforce a specific rule whether they want to or not seems antithetical to freedom. How would we enforce such a thing? World governments? Tech conglomerates? And we would trust them with upholding this for "the good cause?" The FCC has sent me a letter saying that the php script on my computer is not acting in accordance with the Freespeech Autonomy General Support act and I must pay a hefty fine. Freedom achieved!

It sounds silly laying it bare this way, because it is silly. I find it hard to believe any netizen would want every site to be that way, including ones who say they do. The aforementioned Vidlii's former admin "lolwut" is someone I have critiqued heavily in the past for making this same misunderstanding. He is well-intentioned, surely, as I am unsure if he even knows why his site became so shit. He likely believed he practiced the same freedom of speech as the rest of the internet.

I will refrain from going much deeper than I already have, but these incidents crop up, too, for what I believe to be a misunderstanding of freedom itself. Freedom comes not when there are no rules, but when there are no rulers. A rule should be followed when the people want it to be, not because a powerful body says it should.
There exist those who want to be rulers over the internet, but it is not the tired Heyuri moderator that banned you for being a retard. The forest is being leveled and you are still focused on the trees.