Dank memes

But it is a business. Its main purpose of a pub is to sell drinks/food.

I don't think that matters too much, but we can also use some sort of association, like a book club, a boardgame group, etc. The underlying principle is free association and one of the necessary principles behind free association is that you can freely choose to not associate with somebody.

say things like “we’re a [left/right/center] instance.

Politically charged terms like left/right/center are, in the broader context, very vague. To some on the right, somebody like Joe Biden is a extremist leftist. To some on the center he is center to center left. To some on the left, he is a right winger. Similar story with rules such as "respect everyone regardless of identity, gender, race, etc". To some on the right, this would be seen as left wing. To some on the left and center, this is not inherantly political.

So for that reason, I prever servers to just explain their rules and let the users themselves classify those rules as "right-wing" or "left-wing" if they want.

vague language like “don’t be an asshole”

Yeah in my view that would be a bad rule because it's too vague. But something like lemmy.world's rules is pretty clear without the need of placing it left/right:

"Provide a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone regardless of gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, political affiliation, or other similar characteristic."

Essentially, more instances have a liberal lean and strongly push this.

This is true, with modern social media in general, but especially with lemmy. I think there are multiple reasons for this. One is that lemmy especially is used right now by young western tech enthusiasts, and they tend to be left leaning. I also think another issue is that right-wingers seem to have a very confrontational and uncompromising attitude.

There was a little mini-drama on lemmy.world where some users wanted to create a conservative "free-speech" community. Due to the low numbers of conservatives and due to the stated idea that "everyone should be allowed to participate", the sub was mostly looking like 5 conservatives vs 200 non-conservatives making fun of them. Within hours, the mod turned around and started removing comments (which is understandable) he didn't like at random and basically only allowed posts/memes about how "dumb the left is" (which seems to be 95% of what right-wing memes are about). He was informed that personal attacks were not welcome on the lemmy instance, but he just cried about "free speech" and "censorship" and continued to post the same stuff until he was banned.

a higher demographic of liberals get into IT due to colleges tending to be fairly liberal and most formal IT roles requiring a related degree from a college.

This could certainly be one of the reasons. In my country, education is still strongly dependend on non-college education such as apprenticip programs. I work in IT as well, but me and most of my collegues and friends from the field have never been to college. And I do have some right leaning friends, but I would say most are center left to left leaning. But this doesn't just apply to IT, it is just younger people in general tend to lean left.

I believe this is because of the extreme changes that our society has been going through in the past decades and continues to go through. IT especially is a field that is constantly changing and progressing. This is pure speculation, but maybe people with conservative political leaning also tend to be conservative leaning in terms of profession and don't prefer fields that constanly require new approaches.

it effectively takes away from free speech on the web as a whole

I don't see that happening as long as there are still enough spaces for free speech to exist. Your freedom of speech is not a freedom to speak to everyone and anyone. People who don't want to listen to your speak don't have to listen.

I remember irl when people would call each other faggot all the time just for the fuck of it.

Well yeah, back in school. But the web isn't a boy's lockerroom, this is supposed to be an internationally active forum. Maybe this is also a cultural issue, but I couldn't imagine hearing a radio talk show or serious TV program where people casually call eachother "faggot". And I don't mean to give an online platform more meaning than it has, but I think basic respect for eachother is at the very least something that a platform host/admin should not have to justify enforcing if he chooses to do so.

Thanks for the conversation, I think I will look around from time to time, conversations with right leaning people is one of the few things I miss from the mainstream instances.