The difference between a proprietary, politically charged, censored echo chamber and an open source “do whatever you want” platform should be obvious though.

Free speech is about the right to say what you want, meaning the government isn’t supposed to repress you for it, but it doesn’t guarantee the opportunity to do so on other people’s private platforms. However, in this case, you’re free to host your own platform where you can say what you want.

As an aside, I’d like to point out the “Paradox of Tolerance” and the proposed resolutions: If you’re an advocate for free speech, extending that freedom to those seeking to undermine it empowers them to use it against that freedom. That way, “free speech for all” is a good intention paving the road to authoritarian hell.

Hence, it is reasonable to deny a platform for those hostile to your principle. Popper frames it as a form of self-defense, to compromise part of the principle to protect the rest. Others frame it as a social contract of mutual respect, whereby the people violating it also forfeit their own right to demand it.

Either way, if “free speech for all” is a self-defeating principle, an open society needs to accept some measure of illiberty for its enemies if it is to be defensible.

I don’t want fascists to benefit from my work. But it’s FOSS, so anyone can download and install it, so I made it extremely unattractive to fascists.

There are plenty of other places where people can have “free speech”.

Facebook, or reddit, for example. /s