Maybe this is a language semantic thing. Would it be better if I called it a ‘privately-owned townhall’? The idea is that, yes, there is private ownership but they are inviting the public at large.

A townhall is a public institution owned publicly. A privately owned townhall is an oxymoron as far as I see it.

But for argument's sake, I could somewhat see twitter, facebook or the internet overall as a privately owned public townhall to a certain extend.

And maybe lemmy or the fediverse overall could be considered somewhat of a townhall too.

But individual lemmy servers are not townhalls, they are more like privately owned pubs.

It’s not restricted to family members, people who are in a certain line of work, people who have been screened, etc

Well that depends entirely on which lemmy server we are talking about. I'm sure there are lemmy servers that are restricted to family members or people who are in a certain line of work. And there certainly are lemmy servers that only allow people who have been screened.

I don’t think comparing it to a person’s home is accurate either

Fair enough, maybe comparing it to a privately owned bar or pub would be the better analogy. Bars and pubs are privately owned, but in general, anyone who follows the rules can enter them. But if the bar owner feels like you have violated a rule, they can throw you out or even ban you.

However, due to the nature of private ownership, they are allowed to ban/censor as they see fit.

Right, but on a positive note, the code to lemmy is not privately owned, it is public. So while servers can control their own server like a dictator, they don't have any control over other servers.

that is still censorship, which by definition is restricting free speech.

You can certainly see it like that, yes. But I don't see a huge issue with it as long as this is openly stated in the rules of the server and as long as alternatives are allowed to exist.

Online, technology changes that to an extent. Not saying all the functionally exists currently or that kicking them out isn’t still an option. But lemmy is open-source and it is certainly within the realm of possibility that for text-based comments/posts/etc, a screening process to disallow words you don’t want could be added.

As far as I see it, the technical aspects seem to be a big obstacle at the moment. I think with better mod tools and block tools, some servers will probably reconsider re-federation. At the moment, the de-federation reflex seems to be chosen more due to practical reasons (they don't want/can't deal with the additional moderation).

Just that it is short-sighted and petty to do so if the reasons are political ones.

I personally do see the appeal of a "nice" anti-toxic community, it reminds me of the "good old" internet forum days where your comments were removed for the simplest of reasons, like calling somebody an idiot, or posting in the wrong place, or posting something that has been posted before. Many say people nowadays are too sensitive when it comes to what content is tolerated, which does have some truth to it, but many nowadays are also very sensitive when it comes to moderation where they almost believe that any moderation or censorship is inherently bad.

Now I also enjoy free-speech forums from time to time, but I do see the appeal of a heavily moderated "clean" space if I'm being honest. And I don't see how there cannot be both existing at the same time.

But considering user controls exist, I think it is a bit of a control freak move myself.

I can certainly understand that, although I also can understand that constantly blocking people can get annoying.

IMO a lot of the so-called “racist” and “transphobic” (the correct term would be “transmisic”) feelings that exist online today are not true hate of minorities but strong annoyance with political correctness and language control.

I think a lot of it is people being overwhelmed with how fast things are changing nowadays. 15 years ago, about 50% of the people in the US believed that homosexuality should not be accepted. This has changed very very rapidly, so it's natural that a lot of people have issues with that. I also think that equating "racism" and "transphobia" with "hate" is reductive.

During BLM, people are told that in addition to obvious slurs, they can’t say “blacklist” and “whitelist” (despite those terms having nothing to do with race if you study their origins) or “master” and “slave”

That's just liberals doing liberal things.. They don't want to do actual change, they just want to make PR moves. And I think saying "maybe we shouldn't use terms like master or slave anymore" is not exactly the same thing as saying "you can't use the term master or slave".

There’s also some people that get offended bc you refuse to acknowledge their beliefs (e.g. no injecting hormones and mutilating your body, does NOT make you a woman).

Well yeah, when you are convinced that you are a man born in a woman's body, you don't want to constantly be told that you are not a real man. People can disagree if they want, but I understand that people don't want to have this endless debate that will never ever be resolved because those kind of endless debates inevitably end up becoming toxic.

And you will always end up offending someone.

I think this is where my opinion differs to the opinion of many right wingers. Right wingers always think it's about offending people. To me, it's about creating a non-toxic community. In order to do that, you need moderation. This has always been the case, otherwise you end up in a COD MW2 lobby situation where everyone is just screaming insults and slurs into the mic. And I'm not against that because I'm offended by that, I just don't find it appealing as it hinders constructive conversations.