I think free-speech proponents (including myself) have been too slow to realize that monolithic ownership of easily-accessible speech platforms is a separate issue from "free speech" as such, but that it's also extremely important and difficult.
The web, as architected, is theoretically capable of giving a voice to anyone who wants it. But there are a large number of reasons why, in practice, most discourse happens on a limited number of centralized platforms:
- Building your own website takes technical skill that most people don't have. The bar is arguably fairly low, but nevertheless imposing, and the bar for building a "modern" website is much higher.
- Actually putting your website on the internet takes time and money. The more people you want to be able to visit the website, the more time and money it takes.
- Once you've done this, for various technical reasons, traffic to your website will almost always depend on hardware and software provided by a few companies: Cloudlfare, Comcast, CenturyLink, etc. When these companies have outages, they affect large, otherwise-disconnected chunks of the web: https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-dozens-websites-apps-knocked-offline-cloudflare-internet-outage-20200830-eilxiymv25hr7fb4akfmod5hxa-story.html
- Finally, the web is so large that even if you were to host your own content in a robust way, it's difficult for people to discover this content unless it's shared via the mainstream social media networks or easily findable on Google (which is another challenge).
There are a few promising attempts to make truly decentralized platforms that all computer-users can post on for free without learning new tech skills, the most notable of which is Mastadon, a Twitter-like service. But it's a surprisingly tough problem given that we thought we had solved this with the advent of the world wide web thirty years ago.