I think the primary culture in the network (mastodon dot social, not liberal city) are people who don't want to be censored on certain things, but want a restrictive content policy on other things. They want to spread far and wide with other servers with similar content policies.
Those of us in this thread prefer the same, but with a less restrictive content policy.
I think the point of federation is a global network where you get to pick a content policy.