this could be tl;dr so the short of it is I believe in everyone’s right to live as they want as long as they aren’t hurting others, and on many of the other instances what defines hurting others get broader every day bordering on ridiculous.

I used to be on reddit, like wayyyy back. I left because of the increasingly “progressive” tone of most of the sub-reddits. Let me be 100% clear I am left of centre and an atheist, but I have long since learned the live and let live credo, which reddit seemed to be either forgetting or intentionally ignoring. I do not think that wanting a collective good is antithetical to allowing people to live as they want, because I came to the understanding that the “correct politics” of today is “problematic” tomorrow. After the Reddit rebellion of '23 I said it was only a matter of time before it happened to that cesspool of scum and villainy, (refering to the money grubbing management) and I heard about Lemmy. I thought great I’ll check it out. What I found is more of the same “progressive” attitude. The obtuse nature on instances like Lemmy.world, their utter conviction that any ideas that contradict their own are bigotry, their ignorance that attitudes change with time, and their utter disbelief that their morals aren’t universal and people in the future might regard their ideas as “problematic” made Exploding Heads all the more attractive. If you refuse to defend other peoples right to have an opinion, and actively believe in censoring others you aren’t promoting the public good, you are promoting the interests of the powerful. I may disagree with some of opinions on here but I am self aware enough to realize I am not all knowing and that attitudes change with time, and I situationaly aware enough to realize that being exposed to opinions you don’t agree with is the only way to expose and rectify my own biases.

Because another instance I was on threw a fit that this one allowed free speech

I like the idea of Lemmy, but I don’t like how a lot of the instances will defederate from others because one instance might have different views or political makeup - esp towards those who lean on the right; so to find out if I could find an instance that was more open to free speech and exchanges of ideas I went out to see if there was one which had a the_donald community that all the other instances don’t seem to allow – and I will say, that particular community is not even of any interest to me as I’m not a Trump supporter, nor from America, nor am I right leaning either in terms of my political views, but I like the idea of speech and ideas not being censored. So if this particular one will allow the one that seems to always get censored on the others, then that is a good sign to me that overall here speech and thoughts will not be censored – hence why I joined.

I went looking for an instance that wasn’t a left wing echo chamber after a mod on one of the big instances started getting power-crazy in a thread about the affirmative action SCOTUS ruling.

Content here is a little further right than I’m usually looking for, but I don’t have to tiptoe around on eggshells fearing a ban, and that’s what matters.

Cz @masterofballs@exploding-heads.com was tortured by the fbi to stop hosting wolfballs.com