I think Zak has a better take on that than me. I mean ultimately we have all freedom one level further down. We can use this software for pretty much anything. And even modify it. Whatever we like. We can choose to implement total free speech. Or we can decide to moderate. We can talk about privacy, or all kinds of things.

And it’s not some company who makes the rules and says we can’t share illegal content (for example) or hate on each other…

That’s our freedom to decide. But we implicitly agree on something. I for example don’t like hate, misinformation, fascists etc. I block them. And I remove that content. So I technically I take away other people’s freedom to say whatever they want in my communities and on my instance. And a lot of other admins and moderators do, too. And since this network is made up of individuals… That leads to a certain agreement… Otherwise you’d force me to hang out with people I absolutely don’t like, and that cuts into my freedom.

So you can say anything you want. But I can exclude you from parts of the network that I control. But you can do the same.

And since it’s federated: we can have one instance doing one thing and another one doing something else. I’ve not seen any true free speech instance yet. But you could start one. And that’s freedom.

And related to privacy: Here, your data isn’t used for advertising, sold to third-party companies etc.