>You can use whatever you like. They can also kick you off whenever they want. What bit of this is difficult to understand?

The "bending over and taking it" bit.

I don't believe platforms of a size and above should be treated to "they can do whatever they like" / "it's their way or the highway" standards.

I do believe users should have more dignity than to accept that.

I'm not a fan of private corporate control of communication in any form, but the complaints of people who get kicked off services for behaviour that would have them physically removed from private premises are always amusing to see. You join the service, you agree to the terms and conditions, you breach said T&Cs, you complain about "mah free speech!"

If you actually care about free speech, and you have the technical ability to help with either creating, documenting or promoting federated, open source, distributed communication systems, then do so.

I'm jaded on this because I've been involved in a couple of projects with the stated end goal of true freedom of speech only to be torpedoed by either selfish greed or legal ramifications.

I believe the solution to this (and the reason we don't have it) is no longer technical, it's societal.

> I believe the solution to this (and the reason we don't have it) is no longer technical, it's societal.

Yes and it involves not letting effective monopolies dictate the rules for unhindered participation in society.

Those mentioned platforms are big enough that it is not a free market anymore. Guess why the EU is going after them one-by-one.

None of them are monopolies. The EU will eventually be 'looking at' corner stores. If it becomes too costly to operate in the EU, multinationals will eventually leave.

Maybe someone in Europe will invent another cloudflare, github etc. They do have Telegram to replace WhatsApp.

They are monopolistic. If I want to buy Coke, I can go to nearly any store. I don't need to only go to one store.

If I want to interact with an open source project on Github, then I have to go to Github. I can't choose to go to sourcehut or bitbucket to interact with that project.

If github was just another git server (aka just another store) and I could go to any store to get coke (aka open source project), then it wouldn't matter. But it's not just another store or interface.

The combination of git being an open protocol, and open source licensing (as it's meant to be) means that you can definitely fork and re-host many projects on Github. The issues that practically stop you from doing this aren't actually the fault of Github. I'm not trying to defend Github here, but it's not the best example you could have chosen.

What open source project uses multiple DVCS repositories (e.g. bitbucket, github, sourceforge, sourcehut, etc) for one project in sync with each other? I haven't found a single one that does that.

And that's before we start talking about tickets and discussions, pull requests, wiki and documentation, etc.

> What open source project uses multiple DVCS repositories (e.g. bitbucket, github, sourceforge, sourcehut, etc) for one project in sync with each other? I haven't found a single one that does that.

There are some that have official mirrors on GitHub and perhaps even accept pull request here. But I think that only reinfoces the notion that GitHub is an effective monopoly.

The product github supplies is a 'service', project hosting. There are multiple providers of that service. Github is not a supplier of the software projects themselves any more than the telco is a provider of conversation or S3 is a supplier of Netflix movies.

> If it becomes too costly to operate in the EU, multinationals will eventually leave.

Good.

censorship is still censorship just because a private corporation does it.... and it's not a free market at all, there are many regulations concerning these industries