Why does anyone have a requirement to talk to your instance? What if, due to your ideological stance on issues, I don't trust that your server won't decide that mine is distasteful in some way, and that you'd cause your server to disrupt mine in some way by flooding it with messages, for instance? I have legitimately had this happen and it nearly brought down my instance. Some script-kiddie decided to fuck around and spam my account on an instance I run with about 2000 followers in the course of a few seconds. This almost killed my server entirely. Why should I have been forced to interact with their server on the grounds of free speech?
Why does it matter if any instance decides they don't want to associate with you? It doesn't affect your ability to use the service beyond not being able to interact with folks who probably don't want to talk to you anyway.
Forcing someone to make their server software talk to yours is just as much of a "Free Speech" infringement, if not moreso.
> Why does it matter if any instance decides they don't want to associate with you? It doesn't affect your ability to use the service beyond not being able to interact with folks who probably don't want to talk to you anyway.
It prevents people on that instance who explicitly want to follow me from doing so.
It also prevents me from following people on that server from my primary account on my homeserver, even if those people explicitly want the whole world to be able to read their public messages.
Both of those are undesirable interference between mutually-desired communication by Alice and Bob, by Mallory.
Then they, and you, can find another instance where you can mutually talk with each other. You are, in fact, allowed to have multiple fediverse accounts for different purposes/groups of people.
This doesn't address my point at all that you cannot argue that my server is somehow obligated to process bytes from your server.
Tools that disobey their end users are unfit for purpose. They're bad tools, and should be replaced with useful ones.
Your peers' routers are allowed to drop your packets, but nobody is arguing that that's good or beneficial. There is a difference between "within rights" and "good".
Why does it matter if any instance decides they don't want to associate with you? It doesn't affect your ability to use the service beyond not being able to interact with folks who probably don't want to talk to you anyway.
Forcing someone to make their server software talk to yours is just as much of a "Free Speech" infringement, if not moreso.