Honestly you sound really naive. You seem to be under this delusion that people who hold intolerant ideas are only doing so out of honest ignorance and they can simply be convinced otherwise. Have you ever interacted with an anti-vaxxer? A covid-denier? A religious fanatic? A slavery apologist? The world is absolutely filled to the brim with incredibly unreasonable people who will ignore all evidence for things that don't fit their world view. They aren't looking to be convinced otherwise.

How do you plan on "respectfully asking" a homophobe to stop hating gay people, for instance? What if they just want to post about how much they wish gay people would die, what argument do you think would sway someone dedicated to their religion? Since its just speech and not action, they should be free to hate as much as they want according to you.

Your whole point doesn't make any sense either, the idea that people would jump ship to make threads accounts if they were defederated is absurd. The fediverse is an incredibly niche corner of social media, the only reason you would specifically search out for communities here is if you were disatisfied with corporate social media (like threads) to begin with.

Intolerant ideas (including messages and posts) should be allowed, considered, and countered with better ideas. Should be easy, since intolerant ideas are generally shitty ones.

Indeed, such ideas are often baseless, but the people who hold them can still be resolute against rationale, as per Karl Popper's quote in the wiki article above:

... for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive ...

Intolerant actions (and I’m differentiating against speech from action here) should be prevented.

I'll preface this with my personal opinion here, that corporations do not merit civil personhood, yet I think focusing on free speech is veering away from the question and hand: in particular, how should the Fediverse (or at least our instance in particular) respond on engaging with Facebook, in light of what we currently know of the corporation's historic actions, as well as our uncertainty of it's future actions.

I suppose we could also rephrase this question more generally. I.e how should Fediverse communities respond to the hypothetical approach of other social media conglomerates, supposing the Fediverse gains the attention of not just Facebook, but also:

• Twitter
• Reddit
• WeChat
• TikTok
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• etc