Personally I think that we deserve the respect to make our own decisions on this issue. Defederation should be reserved for situations where actual laws are broken that would jeopardize the existence of this instance or even Lemmy as a whole.

As a former mod on a larger subreddit and then a mod on a decent lemmy community, and now a sad mod trying to pick up the pieces (RIP lemm.ee), I've seen how hate can be pervasive in most every sphere. If we start locking things down because we want a hate free Internet, well... We won't have much of an Internet anymore.

My modding style was always the "let 'em cook" method. Unless doxxing, impersonation of a mod, spam, bots, and the like are happening, the community would dogpile the user, and frankly as a bystander seeing coherent arguments against hate was more convincing than just censoring it all together.