Did the admins poll the community about it? Why was such measure so needed? If the tankie content is so annoying why not let users decide what they want to see or not and what they want to block?
I don't like that the admins want to censor the content I can view or not. You guys are not protecting us nor doing us a favor, you're imposing your views over everyone else by limiting the information we are able to receive.
I don't support the devs views or the views in lemmygrad, but this is a dangerous precedent.
I've read several of the "arguments" for blocking the instance and all I can see is a bunch of people talking about politics and arguing about "floods in the frontpage". Well, let the user block communities if that's the case, same way I'm already blocking communities I'm not interested.
I think the admins want to feel like Facebook moderation. I'd be OK with it if any instance repeatedly generated spam, security, doxxing or any other concern that couldn't be solved by banning individuals, otherwise it's just plain censorship.
I just don't want the admins to use their power to decide what I can see or not. If this is going to be like this, I'll leave for a better instance because I can see where this is going to.
How would people feel about a feature where instances have a default user block list, or, hide certain communities from the front page unless a user specifically searches them out. Similar to how EG some instances hide NSFW unless you are logged in, it prevents newbies from having their front page show them stuff that's going to get them outraged at the whole site.
That could be a better solution than defederating some instances, like burggit, where users here are just mad about having a few weird porn communities shown to them. Ideally, communities could opt in the this flagging as well if they want to be less discoverable. Booru sites do this with default blacklist tags, for example, and it's been a successful way of having their cake and eating it too with regard to having normies and weirdoes on the same site and avoiding controversy.
Me, personally, I wouldn't mind if ONLY lemmygrad stayed defeated, but there's going to be more issues like this in the future.