Not at all, we do not disallow any kind of critical speech, unlike the vast majority of Lemmy instances. The TOS are somewhat broad as it’s hard to be specific with these things and discretion always plays a part.

In general, criticism, debate and satire are perfectly fine. Discrimination, personal attacks and insults are not. To give a concrete example, you can say that you don’t like religion X for Y reasons as much as you like. You can’t say that all people of X religion are idiots and you hope they die.

It’s no different than speech about anything else.

Another thing that is relatively unique about our instance is we give communities the right to moderate themselves according to their own rules, so long as they stick to our TOS. This means that you could, for example, start a community dedicated to praising Cthulhu and remove all comments that are even vaguely critical of him from your community, without having the HC admin try to police what you should or shouldn’t allow.

These things make us somewhat unpopular in the Lemmy ecosystem where censorship along political lines is seen as desirable, so long as it favors the left. HC is fairly well known, despite our small size, specifically because we refuse to act like the thought police.