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.
Do you believe governments counties like Saudi Arabia, Russia and China should have the ability to limit speech, as long as it's about things other than government criticism?
Your approach would suggest that you think it's acceptable that the Russian government is censoring any "LGBT propaganda" and retaliationg against citizens for it with fines and prison time.
The problem with people who have conditions for free speech is that they think they (or those who they agree with) will be the ones deciding what those conditions are.
I don't think all speech should be protected.