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.
It’s important to note that most people that scream about freedom of speech are actually wanting freedom from consequences for shit behavior. You can have a freedom of speech instance that promotes civility and educated discourse and I’m here for it. If your idea of free speech is that you have the right to scream at other people, act hatefully and abusively, and cram your ideas down other people’s throats, you’re just an idiot.
I think /r/asktrumpsupporters was a great example of this. You can take people of hugely different backgrounds and beliefs and have civil discourse. Any other site or instance just claiming ‘muh free speech’ is likely full of shit and has a tainted foundation.