The problem with starting a reddit, twitter or etc alternative of any kind, particularly if you care about free speech to any degree at all, is that sooner or later you are going to have to make hard decisions about bad faith users and genuine extremists.

I'm not sure there's an easy, painless or tidy solution to that kind of thing and I think what we see in the link is Saidit brushing up against that same inescapable problem.

We had plenty of issues with the same situation with KiA2 on reddit essentially. Being known as a more free speech version of KiA, we soon started attracting people who either wanted to abuse the relatively open, light touch rules for their own ends, wanted to fuck around just to annoy people or undermine the sub itself and some legitimate Stormfront types who would really rather have liked to drive out anyone other than people like themselves. Most of the latter ended up running aground on reddit's sitewide rules sooner or later, but all of the above types were there attempting to derail the sub in their own vision and all of them came with similar risk to what sites like Gab experienced, where they become overwhelmingly known as being a certain way to the point that it permanently stunted their growth and drove off normies.

What do you do about that kind of thing when the only rules that exist are rules you set, when you also claim to be pro free speech?

It's a genuinely tricky question. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out here, with Saidit's idealist bent.