As we are a general Lemmy instance in the context of federated content, it is our goal to promote a “vanilla” experience when browsing the rest of Lemmy. If we were to pick and choose which content to federate based on subject matter, it would ultimately destroy the utility of using a single account to access all of Lemmy. We host a particular kind of content locally, but only apply our general instance-wide rules to remote content. In other words, we’re hosting specific content here, but we want people to be able to use an account here like they would on any other instance to access the rest of the Lemmy federation. Our front page is essentially identical to any other instence’s front page in the context of the “all” tab; it’s the same as the “popular” section of Reddit. The real solution is to subscribe to communities that you are interested in, and then use the “subscribed” sort instead. This is inherently user-specific, and something you have to explore yourself. We have a guide on how to subscribe to remote communities, which will probably answer your questions.

As for political content on Lemmy as a whole, it has a noticable strong left-leaning slant that tends to bowl over any semblance of centrism. It’s also oddly persistent, to such an extent that the main memes community on lemmy.ml feels more like a political humor community than anything else. There’s also a problematic tie to Marxism-Leninism (“tankies”) though the main Lemmy developers, which run Lemmy.ml. They’re already censoring oppositional speech against the CCP on Lemmy.ml as a quick example. Perhaps not so ironically, strong tankie communities, like Lemmygrad, are being defederated by many of the other instances. Even dbzer0, the closest neighbor in terms of focus (tech and creativity) to this instance, has a pervasive left-anarchist agenda that influences admin-level moderation.

I don’t know about you, but I really dislike admins that moderate based on what political speech is and isn’t allowed. I think community moderators can and should be able to moderate based on political grounds, but administrators should refrain from doing so. I think rules are a legal and ethical requirement for administrators to enforce, like our rule against hateful content sent between users, but mere expression of political ideas in a non-hostile manner should not be the subject of censorship. I also think, on the other hand, that a lot of disruptive and controversial content derives itself from communities with an overt political focus. Communities here are allowed to host discussions on political topics and moderate based on political viewpoints, but the communities themselves cannot be overtly focused on a political ideology for no other major reason than to promote it. It’s a fine line to walk, but I’m committed to both retraining impartial moderation on an admin level and keeping politics as far away as we can without restricting people’s expression like the fanatics already have. We still have moderator and administrator disgression here, and support your interpretation of the rules as they are written.