I'm writing this post to inform you all that I have decided to defederate from the exploding-heads[.]com instance.
After carefully reviewing the instance, reported posts, and comments from our community, content on exploding-heads is clearly mostly—if not completely—in violation of our instance rules, including content posted by the instance admin themselves (a large factor in the decision to defederate any instance).
On other fediverse platforms I run, such as Mastodon, I would typically respond by "Limiting" such instances, since the main goal is to avoid the publishing and promotion of such topics on our public ("All") timelines, rather than control what you can or cannot access. Unfortunately, Lemmy does not yet offer the fine-grained moderation controls to make this possible, so complete defederation is our only option to avoid the re-publishing of content which is consistently hateful and discriminatory.
Defederation from other Lemmy instances is not taken lightly, and in the future I will continue to review instances on a case by case basis.
Lol thank god. “Free speech” instances are absolute cancer.
It's never about Free Speech either. It's almost always about the ability to post racist, bigoted, shit ass content with 0 repercussions.
"Free speech to say what" is a very demanding question to some people. The vast majority will avoid it by saying "anything I want".
Stopping and asking what you aren't allowed to say out loud, and from whom will the consequences be doled out, paints a very clear picture. It's never good shit they can't say, and it's never the govt that is punishing them. Beyond that, nothing in the Constitution says I need to listen to whatever bullshit they wanna say.
"Freedom of association" is a major part of free speech/expression... when certain types start harping about their freeze peach, what they are really saying is that they want to take away others freedom to associate... or dissociate, as it were.