So, as weird as this is to say after I joined with others in telling you your question was bad / unfair, I actually think pretty similarly to you in terms of the value of free speech. I have an instance set up which I’ve been neglecting as I work on some other projects, but once I get time to get back around to it, I plan to operate it as a semi-production server, and to federate with some of the “banned” right-wing instances mostly out of curiosity to see what’s on them.

If you’re interested in an account on my instance, send me a DM and let’s talk, as I do somewhat support your mission. Just I would repeat that as far as I can tell, defederating in practice has not a lot to do with “free speech” and more just with operational sustainability (choosing who to federate with not because you object to what’s being said on certain servers, but just as a matter of keeping illegal or clearly destructive behavior off your instance so that it can continue to function well.)

I’ve argued with tankies at length on lemmy.ml, and just this morning I posted this, and I’ve never had any kind of problem with being banned or having posts or comments removed. I had my posts removed from both the right and the left on reddit, which pissed me off in both instances, but I’ve literally never seen it happen yet on lemmy.world.

I suspect that what you want is not “free speech,” because as far as I can tell, that already exists here to a pretty firm degree. If you really want to federate with everyone, you can run your own instance. If you want someone else to do the work of running the instance, but for them not to be able to defederate to protect themselves from abuse or illegality, I’m not sure what to tell you other than good luck with that.

That’s awesome, this is exactly what I was looking for (or a start towards it at least).