Administrators need to be very careful about who they degenerate because being too trigger happy could be disastrous as you said.

Since people like to use the geographic analogy of countries/cities, communities should be gathering areas like a town hall where people discuss similar topics but instances would be like a city/country/state or whatever.

You don't never speak to your neighbor again just because he's a leftist or a capitalist. You never speak to them again if he and his family all start throwing their dog's poop at your windows. We're forgetting how to converse with people and it's a big problem online and in real life.

We should absolutely be defederating instances dedicated to child porn and other illegal activities, and if there's an instance that's responsible for brigading or attacks then sure. But opposing viewpoints should not be a valid reason to defederate, IMO. If we go down that slope of not being able to tolerate someone else's different views then we are doomed.

I imagine a lot of it could just be ported over.

Re: the "vibrant community"

Yeah, it's like the Nazi bar idea: that if you have a bar and there's one Nazi, you need to kick them out and show zero tolerance, otherwise they'll bring their Nazi friends and your regular patrons will leave and before long, you'll be running a Nazi bar.

The thing is, kicking the Nazi out protects your space and your community, but it doesn't stop them from finding another bar. There's always a Nazi bar somewhere.