I was looking for a lemmy instance that would let me create communities, downvote if I wanted to downvote, and that would take care of troublemakers without being too overly restrictive.

I also wanted to ease the burden on the very busy lemmy instances that were being overwhelmed by the reddit Exodus.

It seems I have found a place. The SDF has a very long history of serving several communities in the internet and Linux world. I first ran into them decades ago, and they are still here.