Well, there are always people who want a more safe space and in turn leave (or threaten to leave) a certain environment. Whether the environment then choses to make itself more safe or to stay the same is a careful consideration. Making it more safe might make other users leave, but also attract others to the instance.

In the same way, there will be people calling for more openess/“free speech”, prompting the same consideration.

For me, the basis of this is given by law; everything else needs to be negotiated dynamically, how open/save an instance is might change over time depending on its users.

Now, in this debate, identity politics tends to favour more safety by default, which might make sense at first, but if you follow it through consistent, you end up in something like garden eden. Because there, everything is safe, you don’t need to fear any threat whatsoever, but you are also not really doing anything. If you default to “safe is always better” you end up in a totalitarian system.

So safety/openness is in general a worth consideration and it should be dynamically debated. Maybe in a few years, consent-based federation proves itself to be a best-practice to make a place safer for trans people and becomes a standard; then we all adapt it happily - that would be fine with me; but if so, I see it at the end of a process.