I read over that conversation. I think nutomic was being pretty reasonable saying that he doesn't want to police what goes up. It's just a list. From my point of view, being on a block list is more advertisement than their join lemmy list. I never read those kinds of list. When I tried mastodon I only joined when people actual recommended me one. And the first one I joined was freespeechextremist. then poast. I did not read on a join list those instances.
Honeslty if they really wanted to hide a instance they should stop listing it in the giant block list on every one of their instances. People will use block list to find cool based instances.