“Freedom” is a concept, it’s neither something unique to America nor is it reliant on any document.

You are either free to express yourself without persecution, or you are not.
The press are either free to publish without persecution, or they are not.

You see, there’s this thing called the Theory of Forms. You probably wouldn’t get it.

Before we get to the changes, we want to remind everyone that we are not a (US) free speech instance.

I’ve never understood this concept. There is no such thing as “(US) free speech”. Threats, coercion and blackmail obviously notwithstanding, you’re either free to express yourself, or you are not. Of course I understand that right of free expression isn’t something that applies to many European people, and there may be pros and cons to that, but nevertheless there is no middle ground on free speech–you’re either free or you aren’t.

But regardless of that, this is your own private community and you’re well within your rights to moderate it however the hell you want, “free speech” really doesn’t come into it at all. That’s one of the main benefits to federation.

Try out a mesh network VPN like tailscale (others are available, but i haven’t tried them).

Tailscale is basically just a simple but powerful wireguard manager that does all of the work of setting up a mesh network for you, and it works amazingly well in my experience. The free account is good for I think 3 users and 100 devices on a network and has been the perfect thing to expose my home server to my various devices no matter where I am.

I like it so much after having used it for the last few months that I just spent way too much money upgrading my server… but that’s another thing entirely. lol