academician

What makes you think this platform has "free speech"? It has a bunch of tools for suppressing or excluding undesirable tools. Most obviously, moderation can be used to remove comments or users from an instance, and federation can be used to remove whole instances from the network.

I value free speech. But not every platform has to support it, and Lemmy explicitly doesn't - unless people just don't just those levers.

Do Lemmy instances not scale horizontally?

I was going to say /r/ExperiencedDevs, but it looks like they made an official instance at programming.dev. So that's pretty great.