The instance seems to be mostly right wing trolls. I know defederating is unpopular but I don't think much is to be lost in this case and it can save the mods some headaches.
Edit: the response on exploding-heads.com to my reporting of transphobia. Courtesy of the "second in command"
It's kind of an ongoing debate between civility-style moderation and 'no limits free speech'. I'm, ideologically, on the free speech end of the spectrum but I have to admit it does allow people to spread memes that are incredibly odious and ones that I feel are both objectively wrong and have the potential to inflict harm.
The only thing keeping me from going the other way is basically the problem we see in this thread. Moderation has to be done by people and that means that some people are elevated to a position where their opinions carry more weight. There are many people here who would choose to ban people who disagree with them rather than allow a conversation. Having moderation of any kind means that this happens on one level or another... but having no bare minimum moderation often leads to bigotry of one flavor or another.
I'm very interested in LLMs and the types of moderation that they will make available. Imagine something like 'You can't spread information that is objectively false' (however that would be defined) and an AI actually reads and digests each posts to compare to literature. So you can't present the opinion that 'The Earth is Flat' or 'We never went to the moon' when there are clear objective facts that contradict that.
I'm sure there are modes of abuse with such a system that people would want to avoid like some Authoritarian country making a rule on their social media platforms that says you can't say negative things about the leader... but it presents alternatives to the free speech absolutism problems.
e: the same people who use the downvote button to downvote things they disagree with are the ones that want to decide who gets to speak.