The answer is anonymity with accountability. Not an easy thing to bake into a messaging or social media platform.

Steem is a very strong contender for the accountability part. The more invested you become in the platform by usage and accumulating Steem, the more accountable you become. Further, there's a lot of hostility toward trolls and socially "abusive" behaviour, which is defined very loosely, by the group.

But Steem has a ways to go with anonymity, as while you can use Steem under a psudonym, the Steemit company knows a lot about you (email, phone number, IPs, etc. etc., read the Privacy Policy). The usual verification means of posting a photo, or using a third party service and connecting with other social media platforms, it completely removes any anonymity. This is why I remain unverified, but I'm looking at using a better solution. And I hope my posting record will speak for itself as time goes on. 😅

Great point on the consequences of free speech, really interesting story about your Facebook group. 👍 💯

As a question to you 🤔 do you think those kind of taboo-busting discussion spaces are something that should be applied everywhere, or are you happy to have it as it's own thing?