> The fact that Twitter is way more popular than Mastodon doesn't really change anything.

We're not discussing what IS, we are discussing what SHOULD BE. The fact that twitter is way more popular than Mastodon absolutely DOES change something... it changes the number of people who can hear the message. One might argue that this SHOULD not make a person's right to be heard on Twitter any different than their right to be heard in a small-town newspaper; another might argue that it SHOULD alter those rights. Any sensible discussion needs to be rooted in the question of what our values are.

I cannot lay out your values for you, but at least I can explain my own. For me, freedom of speech is an important value primarily because it protects those with correct but controversial or unpopular opinions from being silenced. Also to some extent "freedom of speech" is a terminal value for me: people being allowed to express themselves is a thing I value for its own sake.

So how do I run this analysis? Well, the claim is that there are incredibly strong network effects on a system like Twitter, Facebook, and their ilk. In other words, the existence of Twitter nearly guarantees that Mastodon cannot grow very large. And this is different from what happened with newspapers. It is closer to what happened with the telephone system. Although not 100% true, I think there is a great deal of truth to this claim.

So what do we do? One possibility is to say that the network effects shouldn't make any difference, and that we should regulate Twitter (and Facebook, and other similarly situated platforms) like we do newspapers (give them free rein to control what appears on their platforms). This is the position that our legal system is taking at the moment.

Another possibility is to consider this to be closer to the telephone system. Remember that for years there was a single phone system throughout the US, run by a single company (AT&T, "Ma Bell"). Until automated switching systems became fully capable the phone company even had operators who connected calls and were capable of listening in. But they never put in place a policy of kicking people off of the phone system if they talked about topics that AT&T didn't like.

If AT&T had used such a policy it could have drastically altered the history of things like the civil rights movement. Would AT&T have chosen to ban those who supported the KKK and lynchings, or would they have chosen to ban the Black Panthers and those who violated the law in their quest to push for change? I'm not sure which side they would have been on, and I wouldn't want the outcome of the civil rights struggle to have been decided by executives at one company rather than through the collective struggles of the citizens of the country.

So historically, we regulated publishers of newspapers and books one way and the telephone company another way, and looking back at history I am confident that we made the right choice both times. I am not so sure about the way we regulate Twitter and Facebook. Their network effects are less strong than were those of the telephone system, but are still massive. I find this a difficult call to make.

Patreon, on the other hand, seems more clear. There are other payment systems and the network effects are less powerful. If Patreon wants to restrict who can get paid through their platform then other platforms can arise and so long as Patreon isn't leveraging their market dominance to crush these upstarts, that should be fine by me.