I'm writing this post to inform you all that I have decided to defederate from the exploding-heads[.]com instance.
After carefully reviewing the instance, reported posts, and comments from our community, content on exploding-heads is clearly mostly—if not completely—in violation of our instance rules, including content posted by the instance admin themselves (a large factor in the decision to defederate any instance).
On other fediverse platforms I run, such as Mastodon, I would typically respond by "Limiting" such instances, since the main goal is to avoid the publishing and promotion of such topics on our public ("All") timelines, rather than control what you can or cannot access. Unfortunately, Lemmy does not yet offer the fine-grained moderation controls to make this possible, so complete defederation is our only option to avoid the re-publishing of content which is consistently hateful and discriminatory.
Defederation from other Lemmy instances is not taken lightly, and in the future I will continue to review instances on a case by case basis.
So I did not check that instance, but is its content like literally exploding heads?
I don't think it's literal. From what others have posted about their overall content, it sounds like it goes with the right wing blogosphere trope of "making liberal heads explode."
They like to wink wink nudge nudge as if their BS is just trolling, and that their end goal is to piss off left leaning people.
But per the Sartre quote, they know what they're doing. The plausible deniability is a convenient way for them to deflect from the content of their speech and try to flip around to tone police the people they hate.