Maybe instead of using the term “free speech”, which people in this thread (and in the world beyond) understand differently, you can define your own term, or just spell out what it means to you. Disagreement can be valuable but there’s no value in disagreement based on persistent misunderstanding, right?
e: vvvv friend, I’m not your boss, just a bystander to this strange thread. You can do as you like. 
Do I really have to define free speech?
What I’m reading is, “free speech applies to governments not this forum?! Our way or the highway”. Very nice.
Do I really have to define free speech?
Do I really have to define public vs private property?
Also, feel free to host your own qubesos-users-forum.com (do I really
have to define “private initiative”?) and have as much free speech as
you want – then, you can be free to deal with the trolls all the time
without getting paid. And then I will come to your forum and i)
shitpost about edgy stuff, ii) run around fedposting, iii) throw
accusations at you how your place is just a hug-box facebook 2.0.
Did somebody asked you to define public vs private property, or “private initiative”?
Maybe organize your thoughts before posting because none of this makes any logical sense.
I’m going to step away from this thread because there is no point of having a constitutional conversation with people that are trying to redefine words to fit their narrative.
If you think the moderation of this forum is really so bad, then you’re free to start your own Qubes forum. If it’s significantly better, then users will prefer to discuss Qubes there instead of here, and yours will become the de facto Qubes forum. In fact, the same applies to Qubes OS itself, since it’s open source. If you think the project is managed poorly, you’re free to fork the code and run your own project as you see fit. If your OS is significantly better, users will prefer your version over the original Qubes.
Who’s constitution? People here are from all over the world which one and which definition of free speech therein are we supposed to debate? I don’t think this is the place to try and define what free speech or censorship are. I have DEEPLY held political and ideological beliefs around free speech, censorship, surveillance, authority, government, etc.
I come to this forum to help me figure out how to use Qubes not figure out all of the above or have discussion about what constitutes censorship. There are soooooooo many places to talk about IME (my machine is corebooted btw). Why come here and try and fed jacket strangers for no reason? This will never become Facebook, Instagram, X, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft in terms of it’s affects on free speech censorship. Those are massive multinational sometimes trillion dollar companies that control the infrastructure with which entire populations use as a public square. Who’s products are often used as infrastructure to a given nation state. This is NOT that in the slightest. Herein power does not lie.
One reason I use Qubes is to be able to go to the places on the internet where I can have discussions like that freely and openly. I don’t do that here.
I 100% sure that people who I disagree vehemently have helped solve problems I’ve had with Qubes. I know this for a fact because one solution led me to a person’s blog that other than their Qubes related post the rest of the blog was absolutely insane to me. But they KNEW Linux.
So be nice and courteous to the people who give some much of their time and energy for free to allow us to use this tool that helps protect us from real censorship and free speech violations where ever it is that you may live.
This is one of the nicest and most courteous places I’ve ever experienced online cause the scope is small and we’re not here to really talk about anything not Qubes related.
I don’t care if @Sven is a fed (i don’t think you are but who knows 
) Tor was invented by the US Navy/DARPA and many people who don’t trust either still use it cause the tech is solid.
Did somebody asked you to define public vs private property, or
“private initiative”?
Yes, your childish expectations did.
Maybe organize your thoughts before posting because none of this
makes any logical sense.
Logical enough for you?
I’m going to step away from this thread
[… 14 lines elided]
Perfect.
I come to this forum to help me figure out how to use Qubes not figure
out all of the above or have discussion about what constitutes
censorship. There are soooooooo many places to talk about IME (my
machine is corebooted btw).
Simple. As.
I didn’t see the thread (I guess because it was supressed) But that sounds like a legitimate topic for conversation on a forum for a resasonably secure operating system. Also, it’s a legit claim, which is why me_cleaner exists, why coreboot included me_cleaner in its codebase, eand why several laptop manufacturers advertise that they sell computers with IME removed.
People like me have heard it all and made up their minds, but if the forum is a place to discuss Qubes and related topics, then it seems legit so long as it was a civil conversation.
This is a wild standard to set. IME is closed source, and also you’d have to agree on what your threat model is.
Actually wait. The fact that there is closed source code running on your computer, and that this code has access to the network and I think the hard drive is a threat. That’s why we (meaning the Qubes, and Linux, and broader open source community) are in the open source community. It’s the whole game right there: closed source software is a threat in proportion to how much power it has over you or your system. If we didn’t all believe that, we’d buy Macbooks.
The broader point here is that it’s a topic that should be open for discussion, not one that you or anyone else should be in a position to shut down, even if in your opinion and your threat model, IME isn’t a concern.
Plus I find it humorous because I’m old enough to remember when IME was new, and everyone was freaking out abuot the “obvious” security risks, like it was the end of the world.
That’s an extreme statement, but I will say that this is now the second time on this forum that I’ve seen a surprising apathy toward user privacy. The first was when I was troubleshooting a RAM problem, and someone asked me to post the entire output of my startup sequence - which of course contains UUIDs and stuff like that. When I offered to provide specific information instead, the person got angry. Something you’d expect on a Microsoft forum, rather than a Qubes forum.
But that doesn’t mean he was a fed. 
Exactly.
True, and it’s annoying. So can I suggest that the best recourse when that happens is to politely point the newbie to coreboot, where these concerns would be more appropriately voiced (rather than
hiding the thread, etc.)? For example:
https://doc.coreboot.org/community/forums.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/coreboot/
It sort of depends on the definition. EFF agrees with you: Intel's Management Engine is a security hazard, and users need a way to disable it | Electronic Frontier Foundation
But Intel says no: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005974/software/chipset-software.html
Intel also says “The Intel ME performs various tasks while the system is in sleep, during the boot process, and when your system is running.” And that might be a problem if your threat model includes having your computer do stuff you didn’t tell it to , and can’t check.
The words aren’t what matters though. What matters is the tech, and that’s probably outside the scope of a Qubes forum. (and for us olds, it’s been discussed a lot.)
The Qubes team is pretty notorious for being rude to its user base, and being insular (just read the github issues). They also do a lot of really great work. This issue (and the reactions from the Qubes team) is kind of typical for them really.
I’m confident the majority opinion of the participants of the forum on the subject of trillion dollar corporate closed-source unobservable IME and PSP is that they are Not Good, for myriad reasons. The second most popular opinion is “what are IME/PSP?” And I think there is no third opinion (rounding down), on this forum.
You’re expecting people who volunteer their time & work here for free to do something you demand? Under what agreement are they obligated to do that ?
I absolutely do not have time to read / catch up with this discussion. But I’d say the very fact that discussion is happening shows how much this community wants to give people the benefit of the doubt and provide space for feedback and scrutiny over mod’s actions. We are not perfect and speaking personally, my time one the forum has been 99% dealing with moderation, which takes a toll of course. Sometimes I only have time to push buttons, but make an effort to provide justifications when I can.
But it’s as others have said. This forum is about Qubes. Some things are right there in the limit of what is Qubes related and what’s not. But we have made the decision to keep it centered in Qubes. So other venues are preferable.
As we can see these topics tend to get very heated discussions (understandably so) and exactly because of that reason they must be discussed in the communities who directly deal with those mitigations. Qubes does not directly address these threats and therefore it is out of scope for the forum.
You are right to be concerned about Intel ME (I’m concerned, too). However the dedicated discussion was never suppressed: Intel vPro - What it can do, what it *can't* do, and what it means for your future hardware choices