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.
You can't abuse a right. That's why it's a right.
Also you're confusing Free Speech with the First Amendment. It's concerning that it's a very common mistake from people with strong opinions on the topic.
Free Speech is not exclusively about governments. It's a principle that ideas should be allowed to be exchanged without restriction. Yes, even the ideas that are pretty much indefensible.
The reason isn't because we want indefensible ideas to spread, it's because we can't trust any entity or even the society to decide what is acceptable to express. For example, in many countries you will simply get beaten up for expressing support for LGBT rights, regardless of government censoring you. They are using the "fuck around and find out" approach.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech :
Emphasis mine. You're not a huge proponent of free speech. You sound like you're only a proponent of the first amendment.
Nah. You’re off-base here. You’re very clearly falling prey to the Paradox of Tolerance.
I'm not sure the fine folks that come crawling out of the woodwork to defend free speech specifically when it's Nazis are falling prey to anything, unfortunately