If I’m not allowed to have a discussion or disagreement with you, and get kicked out instead, I’ll just go to places where they will talk with me

I actually tried to, and if it was possible to have rational and polite discussion, without straw man arguments, dog pilling, personal attacks and finally threats of violence, I would have continued to try. But sadly all of this happen, multiple times.

At some points I considered leaving Lemmy, thinking that this federation as a whole was not safe for debating. But then I started understanding patterns, either it was from the users from a specific instance, or it was communities from a specific instance that turned like that. Overall the pattern seem to be that if the instance mentions extreme political ideologies in its description or if the profiles of its admins do, then debating is not possible.

If they want to stay connected to people to avoid the circle jerk, they have to work on themselves too (ex: learning to debate politely), you can't except us to absorb all the damages to help them avoid radicalization. It's like walking towards a terrorist group with flowers while they are shooting around and expecting them to be inspired by your pacifism.

I do enjoy debating and questioning my own beliefs, but I am not on Lemmy to consume my mental health, so I need to take some actions to protect it.

I'm not on the internet or lemmy to make the world a better place, I'm on here to kill time/enjoy myself/learn some things. I dont have the mental space to deal extremists, and particularly extremists that have a world view thats incompatible with itself if taken at face value, and I certainly dont have anything valid that I can learn from tankies, and as such, my block list has gotten quite large, and my general mood has increased because of it

I “blocked” hexbear, because a mod didn’t take the time to use their brain, labeled me a “pedophile apologist” and banned me from the entire instance. If they moderate based on “I don’t care what actually happened, I’m mad” then I’m not going to bother interacting with them.

I was planning to, but ultimately didn't. I have handed out personal blocks to obvious trolls and a brunch of hexbear users that spammed gifs in every single thread though.

This operates under the assumption that there are good decent people on every instance, but instances like Hexbear and Lemmy.ml are inherently corrupt and run by people who want to sow misinformation and chaos to negatively impact western powers. I'm not saying the whole thing is a Chinese operation, but if it were then it would be run exactly the same way it is now.

It's actually the other way around, the more users you have the cheaper everything eventually becomes

That's what mullvlad say. It's not necessarily the reason why they don't offer port forwarding.

It was always possible for them to continue allowing port forwarding. They could use separate servers for those that want port forwarding, stopping any impact port forwarding had on those customers.