@freemo I'd like to join the instance because I'm interested in STEM and free speech (also in activism both FLOSS and political). I have seen people banned in mastodon.social for opposing queer theory in a debate (respectfully), because that is treated as transphobia here, apparently, and I wanted to be sure those stances are ok in the instance along with radical leftwing ones (communism). Also, I wanted to know why spinster.xyz and ussr.win are silenced (just curious). Thanks in advance.

@DracoMagister Its a tough question to give a solid answer on without knowing the exact question. In general no not if it is respectful and considerate of others. Some ideas would be hard or impossible to voice respectfully though (for example if someone supported genocide).

If your respectful and you dont intrude on debates you have been told you arent welcome in (or its implied) you should be fine. We basically require our users to be kind, respectful, and respect a users right to disengage.

Spinster was silenced because their users didnt respect our right-to-disengage. When a user was requested over the course of 24 hours to leave one of our users alone they did not and repeatedly tagged the users and incited others to do the same, intentionally and unapologetically. In moderator discussion it became clear this was not a violation of their rules and thus were suspended. You can see the log of the decision here:

ussr.win was a similar issue, at the time (and still) we made all moderation discussions public and can be seen here:

https://discourse.qoto.org/t/report-375-ussr-win-and-zlax/73

Hope that addresses your issues