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Comment by Karsteski | Hacker News Reader

> fix the reason why a commercial for-profit company is regarded as public square in the first place.

This would be ideal. The network effect is strong. As Barrin92's response to my comment stated, anyone can make an alternative site. But all of the value comes from the large networks of people on these sites.

I would prefer if such a "public square" site weren't for profit, if I'm going to be honest. Not sure how well that would work, but profit motives introduce too many flaws for such a necessary part of society. OTOH, so do influences from other means...

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The problem is no 'public square' can be defended adequately, particularly if everyone can access it.

Misrepresentation of the publics interest and voice will continue to occur. There is no solution that I'm aware of.

When you say misrepresentation of public interest, what do you mean by that?

I mean when news/politician/ect cherry picks specific and narrow online environments (usually astroturfed) to target or represent a larger group.

> I would prefer if such a "public square" site weren't for profit, if I'm going to be honest. Not sure how well that would work

Works perfectly fine. There are plenty of alt-platforms that are based on self-hosted principles like that (Mastodon, Pleroma, Matrix), and all of them are about the most "free" platforms (rather, protocols) you can find.

Yea, I do think protocols, not platforms, is the way to go. I especially like the way Mastodon works because you can allow/disallow federation of servers without actually being able to deplatform others

As a Mastodon admin, I wholeheartedly agree. I can decide not to connect to a given server, but I can't stop that server from existing. I think this is an excellent design.

You're just describing Usenet, which still exists, and is still easily accessible, and has been around for decades on end. Honestly any action to crack down on social media for enforcing their terms of use for their own platform is a solution looking for a problem.

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