So do I! fist-bump
> ...cited the fact that he was German and that German law outlawed various speech related to Nazism.
This would be relevant for any Mastodon service hosted in Germany right?
> The creator of Mastodon is actively against the concept of free speech....
Woah, you lost me there. Free speech (at least within a common society) cannot be the irrevocable right to say whatever you want with no consequences. If people do not want to hear what you have to say, why should they be forced to listen? My understanding of Gargon's (creator of Mastodon) position is that he prioritizes localizing moderation responsibilities so that the decision of what kind of speech should be "free" is not made centrally. That seems like a reasonable position to me.
Honestly I was fascinated by how the drama of Gab and the fediverse played out. It seemed like a really good test of the core goals and ideals of the whole Mastodon/fediverse project. No one could stop Gab from creating a Mastodon instance (per the decentralized design and open source software). However, other Mastodon servers moved quickly to block any interaction between Gab.com and their servers. This was decentralized moderation at work. Each instance could make the decision for themselves.
The various client apps that chose to explicitly refuse to connect to accounts on Gab's instance was another really interesting move to me. Personally, I don't generally like to try and tell users of the apps I develop how they should or should not be used. However, I respect the rights of other project maintainers to develop their apps as they see fit. And once again, the beauty of open source software is that if you don't like how a certain project is being maintained, you can fork it! (And that is just what happened with those Masto apps, where several were forked to reenable access to Gab accounts).