Might be a bad idea for me to go into this while having ptsd issues, especially when I’m probably about to do a long ass sleep, but yolo.
Basic synopsis on my feelings here:
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tl;dr: I used to believe we should be federated, but after 3ish years of interacting with lemmygrad on various accounts, I have noticed that lemmygrad is not a place that is safe for transgender people at large. The reason for this is principally their debatelord culture and refusing to comprehend that debating a point against a minority’s lived experience, then demanding civility when that minority gets angry, is the same shit liberals do.
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I noticed instances of reactionary content, such as here and/or comments are not removed or users banned. Lemmygrad seems to prefer to debate reactionaries, and obviously subjecting minority groups to reactionary content for personal fun is callous at best, and reactionary at worst. Its important to make it so that there are designated areas for dunking on reactionary content, as well as nsfw and content tags to avoid it. Otherwise, reactionary comments should be removed and visible in a mod log.
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I discussed in this post why it is important to remove downvotes to protect trans people. After I noticed people were creating evasive comments to debate me, I pretty much told them to fuck off. This resulted in a ban from their admins and they continued to defend their policy. This reminds me a lot of the struggle sessions we used to have about adding pronouns to the site or removing downvotes. People would be evasive in this same way to give the benefit of the doubt then demand civility when people get angry. Those people are not allies and should be purged.
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The admins seem to have a principle misunderstanding of why minorities don’t want to see any form of harassment or discrimination directed at them and how that is perpetuated across social media sites. They seem to legitimately believe that keeping downvotes means that they will be able to stave off reactionary content or is somehow a valuable tool in responding to reactionary content, when in reality they should be removing and banning reactionary content.
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Certain users were very keen on civility bullshit, particularly @[email protected], @[email protected] (an admin), @[email protected]. This is honestly the most disgusting behavior I’ve seen on lemmygrad, and the fact that the admins doubled down on it is fucked.
I can see staying federated to a bunch of very small instances, especially queer focused and hobby instances, but I’m pretty soured on the fediverse at this point.
I’m extremely disappointed in what I’ve seen of the lemmygrad mod team. Why are they making me into a splitter over such a basic issue of avoiding the harassment of trans people at a systemic level, bastards 
I am willing to retract this if the admins of lemmygrad self crit and apologize for temp bans or otherwise of my accounts on civility reasons and make it clear that debating the lived experience of anyone of a minority group is unacceptable going forward. There are positive and proactive ways of discussing someone’s lived experience without going into debate territory and trying to find a technicality in lived experiences to support an opinion you already hold. I maintain that removing downvotes is a boon to trans users, if you can come up with something better than that and implement it, I am all ears.
A few things about this.
On the one hand:
I agree with you on removing downvotes being a good change, especially for minorities, and I think the argument that “downvotes help hide transphobic rhetoric” is a “free marketplace of ideas”-adjacent argument that ironically relies on the majority to support the minority.
I agree that the admin telling you “Actually, removing downvotes does not make it a better experience for trans people” does fall into “debatebroing a trans person’s lived experience” territory and is definitely worth criticizing.
On the other hand I read through the thread and think I need to point out some things:
You opened up with “we should do what hexbear does” and when someone disagreed, you immediately went to “So you think hexbear is platforming reactionary content?”, which is needlessly hostile and turns the whole thing into a lemmygrad vs hexbear debate when it really shouldn’t be.
I disagree with calling this “civility fetishism”. Civility fetishism is when people tell you to be calm while you’re talking about hospitals being bombed in Gaza or when they tell you to be polite towards nazis, I don’t think it’s inappropriate to remain civil when talking about whether you should be able to downvote posts on lemmygrad dot ml. Civility is not inherently a bad thing, we only mock it when people tell us to be civil while arguing with people who actively want us dead.
I think some people in that thread are right that you are too quick to assume bad faith from a group of people who, and I can’t stress this enough, aren’t your enemies. Lemmygrad and hexbear agree on 99% of issues and personally, I have seen very few shitty takes from them. I think this admin was being kind of a douche and a debatebro, but they’re still an admin on an explicitly marxist-leninist site that is overwhelmingly more good than bad.
I think you had an incredibly uncomfortable and frustrating experience because you got dogpiled on and downvoted on lemmygrad and consequently talked yourself into a rage, which I can sympathize with, it’s a terrible experience, I’ve been there. As you yourself said, you’re probably not in the best mental state to argue about this right now. I would urge you to cool your head and try to review the discussion in good faith. Assume that other MLs aren’t your enemies and they might just be wrong on this issue for normal reasons, not because they’re actually a reactionary who wants to suppress minorities. Remember that a lot of people on hexbear also opposed the removal of downvotes before it happened.
This is the bottom line for me. If we can’t get along with people we’re aligned with this closely, we’ll never get anything done.