Having no moderation is definitely a non-starter, since the community would eventually devolve to something like 4chan. I’m just wishing for a Lemmy instance where center-left and center-right folks could interact and discuss general topics, some of which may be political. Politics intersects with so many areas, so having strong political restrictions would really limit the type of discussions that the instance could have.

The Lemmy developers have no obligation to create such a space, you’re right about that. But the Lemmy software is pretty great, and it would be nice to be able to point interested newcomers to an active Lemmy instance where they can talk about a variety of common topics, without alienating a large chunk of these people.