I’ve always thought about it like this: one person’s freedom stops where another person’s freedom begins. When freedoms start conflicting, a negotiated compromise is needed and thus legislation is often involved. So, for example, it should be illegal to threaten somebody’s personal safety, because otherwise there isn’t a good balance between freedom of speech and freedom of security.
The corollary to this is that as population density increases freedom gets more limited, because people’s circles of freedom overlap more. Modern society has a lot more limitations on personal freedom because that is the only way to equally provide access to freedom to everyone in a denser world.
> So, for example, it should be illegal to threaten somebody’s personal safety
Even this seemingly-simple example is complicated in practice: who decides whether safety is threatened? I have seen people claim to feel physically unsafe whenever someone raises the question of how specific women's sports should handle participation trans women, and I have seen other people claim to feel physically unsafe when someone suggests raising taxes to fund more public services (immediately reaching for comparisons to the USSR in the 1930s).
Is the test then whether someone feels unsafe as a result of the speech? Or whether a "reasonable person" would feel unsafe? And so on, and so forth.
There's really no good way to win completely here: either some people are going to feel unsafe, or you have to have _quite_ draconian speech restrictions to try to avoid that (and probably still fail). You might be able to do something that works for neurotypical-enough people, but that's the best I can see.
The corollary to this is that as population density increases freedom gets more limited, because people’s circles of freedom overlap more. Modern society has a lot more limitations on personal freedom because that is the only way to equally provide access to freedom to everyone in a denser world.