Edit: Apparently it is possible to create a blank comment. Here is some content for it:

Weekly instance defederation talk loaded with emotional/psychological manipulation, moral grandstanding, and why not, some bullying.

This is why I log into this instance's account less and less. Every time I come here, there is someone trying to get another instance defederated; usually because they saw a few posts they didn't like from a single community on that instance. Rather than banning that community, they think the whole instance should be defederated.

Also, I think you hit it right on the nose with the bits about McCarthism and the Paradox of Tolerance. It seems the internet has forgot the danger of the Red Scares, and makes me wonder if the left-wing version will be named and taught in classrooms in the future.

Though it would definitely be easy for reddit or alphabet soup agencies to use these kinds of tactics to destabilize competition or hard to control entities, I don't think it is necessary at all. It seems to just be human nature to suppress and dehumanize those we disagree with. It is an easy way to justify what people want to do anyways.

Laces wear out over time too. Also, nicer velcro is sold, though I have no idea if it lasts longer.

Nay

I am not too worried about the technical difficulties of hosting an instance, but I really don't want to deal with the social ones. I would rather sit back and appreciate @TheDave for the trouble he and the other admins go through.

While I want to blow off this comment with something like, "zealots will be zealots", that first link reads almost like a fantasy novel description of cartoon bad guys. It is a bit weird seeing it laid out like that, and that is from someone who spent a bit too much time in church during my late teens.

Thanks, I will have to check them out later. I am almost a bit surprised that I don't recognize SDF. I spent some time using a few telnet sites some years ago.

@TheDude

Hello and thank you for taking the time to respond to my post.

I appreciate you clarifying your stance on future blocking for both personal reasons and along the human decency lines. While I may lean fairly deeply into free speech territory, I also recognize the need for certain limits. The balance you've struck seems to be very reasonable, though I admit to being a hair surprised by the community driven approach.

I look forward to seeing which direction the community takes the instance.

If you prefer to remain ignorant until you accidentally stumble across the truth then that is your problem.

That is interesting.

Edited since I mixed up which comments were for which poll.

When I skimmed the announcement where he created the Agora, I missed that part completely. I thought it was just about people donating. Based on the link in the post, I thought he was making all these decisions himself while maybe considering input from others.

Doesn't seem like there is much point in DMing him now.

That makes sense and I probably should have considered it more, though I also thought it would be useful if the response was public. Since I went searching for it myself, I thought other new users might do the same.

Turns out that I completely misunderstood the community structure here. There is a good chance that I was the one being confusing.

Now that I know who you are, I have checked out The Agora and a lot of what you are saying has a bit more context. It seems I posted this in the wrong place and misunderstood the community structure here.

Thank you for your time responding. Once I spend a bit more time looking through The Agora, I may end up asking another question or two.

You might be right about that DM thing. I thought I was in a small enough instance to get a direct response that would be useful to future users who wanted to move over. It seems I have misjudged that.

I didn't mind a bit of discussion and question answering, but to be frank being thrown red-herrings and called a troll was definitely not my goal.

Ah, thank you for filling me in.

Thanks. I appreciate the sentiment.

Thank you for the suggestion, but their blocked instances list is about the same length as the one from lemmy.world

I hadn't really considered that whole instances would be banned for nothing more than having bots. I may need to look more into what lemmy.world was banning for.

Who are you? A few posts back, when you responded "anything else?", I checked to see if you were a mod of this community or admin of the instance but I don't see you in either list.

Seems like I would save myself sometime by creating a dozen different logins through the various instances. I am up to four now.

I guess using current number of blocked instances was not as useful of an indicator for finding an instance that was free-speech leaning, but not purists, as I thought it was.

Nope, that is it. Though I would have liked to have heard it from the proverbial horse's mouth.