There can be good users and bad users, even good mods and bad mods from any one instance, though it usually ends up trending in one or the other direction over time. This little incident isn't very auspicious for their instance though. My experience has always been rather hit or miss with midwest.social.
Yeah I might have jumped the gun on calling for defederation. We should just give them the db0 treatment: ban their admins but stay federated, the ultimate power move.
Yeah, I think that treatment should be the standard response to any instances with shitty anti-communist mods/admins but that still have at least some contingent of cool users. I think midwest.social fits that category. But yes, doing that is not only the funniest move, as we learned with db0, it's like getting the best of both worlds. If the general users of an instance start getting regularly abusive, especially towards more vulnerable groups, that's when it's time to consider the full defed option imo. Fortunately, I don't think we've had an issue with that on the scale of an entire instance since, what... blajah and shitjustworks?