I’m of the opinion that they use Loli as the reason just cause it’s the easiest, but if we didn’t allow loli I’m sure it’d be defederated for something else. We’re very lax when it comes to content, allowing pretty much anything so long as it’s legal and doesn’t actively cause problems for our instance or its users. I just think allowing loli gives people an easy out to immediately defederate without having to explain themselves too much. I’m seeing instances become more and more defederation happy as things progress. I can see a split happening, similar to how things are currently on mastodon/pleroma/akkoma. As lemmy instances rise and fall, this will become less of an issue, since no matter which side you are on will have enough federated with you to not be too excluded. Even if for the short term it causes us to be less-federated.

I definitely think that sticking with our policies is far more important than worrying about federation, since what matters most is what our users think of us, not what other users think of us. I saw someone compare this to countries in the past, where you’re going to put the needs of your country over the needs of others. I think that’s fairly accurate for this.