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Comment by amalantony06 | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of your political views, behaviour such as this from tech monopolies/gatekeepers should be a cause of concern for anyone who'd like to keep their freedoms (esp of speech) intact.

The ideal scenario would be for people to use the web as how it was originally intended: ie, everyone having custom websites (and private emails) hosted on a VPS with an RSS feed so that your friends can follow your "feed". That way you'd own your content and wouldn't have to worry about censorships/account bans etc.

Discover-ability is just about the only downside with this.

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This to me is Twitter becoming the want-to-be William Walker of Modern day Social Media. They’re conducting foreign policy as a private entity. Maybe they will suffer their own self-capture too.

That should not be.

TIL who William Walker was. Filibust to Twitbust. Who knew.

Exactly, this shouldn't be a freedom of speech issue -- Twitter's freedom to say whatever it wants on Twitter should trump anybody else's freedom to say whatever they want on Twitter.

But it is a freedom of speech issue because Twitter is a monopoly/gatekeeper. That's what needs fixing.

No solution. Internet infrastructure has been politicised now too and credit card processors.

AWS and Google Cloud are not the only infrastructure providers around ya know ;). There are plenty of other superior and cheaper alternatives like Linode, Vultr, Digital Ocean, OVH, Hetzner etc.

Regrading credit card processors, I don't see why it'd be necessary for a personal website. If it's about accepting donations, one could accept cryptocurrency.

And you'll be really naive to think that Vultr/DO/OVH/... won't deplatform you like others did already. Pretty sure that if you search a bit you can find people that has been booted off them

This is a poorly thought out comment. Hosting providers are a commodity and so they cannot de-platform you. Only a platform like Twitter can de-platform you. If a hosting provider suspends your account, you still own the domain and all your data - you'd just move it to the next host.

Besides, when there's sufficient demand, there'd be several more options for hosting, including ones that are "pro free speech". OTOH, monopolies could end up destroying individual liberty and choice.

Yeah I agree that "deplatforming" wasn't the good terminology.

You'll have to had external backups, I know lot of people are just using their hosting provider backup services.

There can be several more options for hosting (just as there's other options for a Twitter-like platform), but eventually, instead of harassing the host to suspend them, the upstream provider could be harassed to suspend the host itself. And you don't have as much choice when it comes to Tier-1 ISPs.

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