The "free speech" argument to not defederating doesn't even hold water on lemmy. They still have their instance and are still allowed to say whatever the fuck they want. They're still federated with whoever is willing to put up with them. They just have to it away from everyone else, by themselves, hopefully into a void.

In my opinion the fact that things are federated is sort of one of the biggest advantages of, well, federation. You can curate your federation, and defederate from whatever shit show you want, without having to have a conversation about encroaching on someone's "free speech." Unfortunately people haven't quite figured that out yet because they're so used to the monolithic corporate run social media platforms. Maybe it'll start to catch on and we can put this tired conversation to rest.