I get the feeling their argument wasn't 100% over illegal content (but I do agree - you shouldn't expect a bunch of individuals to try to fight potential legality issues, I certainly don't), part of it may have been in regards to all of the other reasons defederation occurs. Such as LW removing piracy communities for legal reasons, as opposed to Beehaw defederating from LW/SHIJW over the open registration nature of those instances.

Thankfully my instance is mine, so I get to make those decisions for myself. Unfortunately I'm not surprised though that there seems to be a bit of a split between people who evangelized Lemmy as the "where Reddit can't decide to block content" (which I saw a lot of, during the sub protests) and then on the outside that's exactly how it looks.

Telling people to host their own instance, or to have multiple accounts on multiple instances is probably the equivalent of the same thing being discussed here as the Linux evangelists who go "Well just use FreeCAD" (to use an example from further above) when they say they use Windows because they're involved in professional CAD work.

There's a lot of nuances between Lemmy, Federation, and The Fediverse as a whole that gets left out when people introduce others to it and I've seen a lot of cases where that causes precisely this issue - it's sold as a one size fits all solution when that couldn't be further from the truth.

I have no stance (I'm not here to tell other admins how to run their instances) on the subject of the matter in this comment chain, but that's how I see it when I try to "play devil's advocate" and look at it from different lenses.

Illegal stuff? Sure block it, I totally respect the need to CYA.

Blocking lemmit.online 'cause it's a bot, which yields low content and pollutes "All"? Block lemmynsfw, cause of NSFW content? ... well, as an adult I'd prefer I could make that choice for myself and have it governed by my own tolerances.