This is turning into an interesting discussion. My previous forum used to have these discussions all the time, but not so much on Medium.

I belong to a petroleum engineering group on LinkedIn. It was moderated, and we had lots of great discussion about things related to petroleum engineering. For example, we had a great discussion on the real reasons for the BP Macondo blowout. For some reason, I stopped coming to the group.

When I returned to the group 2 or 3 years later, the moderator was gone. The group became a free-for-all. Maybe 25% of the post were related to petroleum engineering. Very few posts had any threads to them. There was a lot of internet hawkers. The great dynamic was gone. The forum had gone further into the direction of free speech, but many petroleum engineers went away.

In my previous website for my alternative democracy, I had set up a discussion board. The board got about 10 internet hawkers a month, and I had to spend a little time deleting their posts. I never got much discussion about democracy. Eventually I'm tired of deleting, and the board became an internet flea market.

I have a new website. I will set up a discussion board when I sense I have people wanting to discuss an alternative democracy. I will moderate this discussion. Posts like "Dave, you are a *&$)#{#{" will be deleted immediately and its writers will be blocked. Posts like "The USA already has the best democracy ever, so there is no need to investigate Dave's new way" will be tolerated for a short time. But if such a poster continues with only platitudes, I probably would block that poster as well.

I want to create a culture that has sensible discussion around an alternative democracy. I will accept naysayers as long as they make their points well.

The above anecdotes are from mini forums. The owner of these forums gets to be the legislator, police officer, prosecutor, and judge. If the owner does things right, the forum should thrive and prosper. If the forum goes all free speech, it will eventually evolve into something quite useless.

In a like manner, social media (like Medium or Facebook) should have the right to set up their own rules. Otherwise chaos will prevail--and they will lose whatever culture they want to create.

The problem with the big forums is the difficulty in trying police the rules. In your case, I suspect some radical transgender person didn't like what you were saying, turned you in, and the "moderator" spent less than a minute to find you guilty.

I really don't think the bigger social media will ever be able to police their own rules consistently. From what I've seen of Medium, it would have let your original post stand. Methinks you just got a bad judge, someone who is 22 years old, poorly paid, might have a political agenda to implement, and gets to play a small god. Having said that, the appeal process in the bigger social media outlets is next to pointless. I would not expect any resolution.

If there were no rules in Medium, the radical conservatives would happily invade Medium with their rabid posts. Medium would no longer be pleasant for me if 75% of posts are about those #$*$) lib-turds. Then we add internet hawkers and amateur porn producers into the mix.

So my take is that the social media outlets have the right to set and enforce their own rules. When we ask government to interfere in their rulings, we risk social media outlets becoming less useful to their users.

I realize this might not help in your current dilemma with Medium. But I think your situation might be a freak accident rather than a deliberate and institutional attempt to silence you.

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I've been on Mastodon for a couple of months. I have not got much traction for my alternative democracy. But I'm just going to limit myself to 10 minutes a day with this forum. I'm still learning.

From what I can gather, there is no monolithic Mastodon server. Rother it has allowed other entities to create their own group of Mastodon users. These groups are called "instances" and can set up their own rules. For example, my instance limits posts to 500 characters. I just found an instance that allows 5000 characters. I have the freedom to change instances.

So the radical conservatives and radical transgenderites can have their own instance--and do whatever they want. The instances are connected together as the algorithm find posts from other instances that I could be interested in. I can comment on these posts.

If someone comments on my posts with "Dave, you are a *(%#{#*(," I can block that person. I can also block the entire instance.

I think that is how it works. Each instance polices itself; if the instance gets too rough, it starts loosing connections to the Mastodon "fedaverse."

I might have more insights later. But it is an interesting to way to keep free speech alive and have some regulation.