If it helps to know, moderator resources here are extremely limited, in part (I've heard, so take with a grain of salt from someone who has no direct knowledge or the situation) bc the tools themselves are extremely terrible, especially across instances.

And I have extra sympathy for communities like politics where all sorts of stuff are spewed at the mods, who have to cater to people from all across the world, each one absolutely convinced of the extreme rightness of their own particular niche cause - influenced by religion, culture, laws, etc. and seemingly unwilling to understand how anyone could possibly live differently.

So I get it: if it's a choice between the instance itself facing legal pressures from the police, I can see why an instance admin would immediately give up any "right to free speech" - which isn't really a thing online, despite how many people claim that it should be.

The Fediverse allows us to spin up our own instances (kind of a heavy burden though), and most instances allow us to create our own communities - if we would only actually USE this power, then it would offer the freedom that it genuinely promises. e.g., you could personally start your own community, or help grow an existing one by posting or even just commenting inside of it to help make it more welcoming for people. It's a thought anyway:-).

e.g. instead of always using !news@lemmy.world, block that and use !globalnews@lemmy.zip. The latter has grown tremendously since it started, yet still has only a quarter of the subscribers in the former (actually here I'm using monthly active users when viewed specifically from the instance it is located on, as a significantly more precise statistic of how many actually use it as opposed to merely subscribed at some point in the past), but we can make it grow - if we really wanted that to happen.