The other stuff didn't bother people enough to leave, but rebranding? That's the step too far. Anyway Mastodon usage has fluctuated a good amount over the last few months so I don't think that's a good metric for people fleeing Twitter, or should I say X (what a terrible name).
Twitter's value was in its branding as the case with any ubiquitous product. There was zero reason to change it other than to further damage the entity. Fine with me Elon, go ahead and kill it, one more failed corporate driven media site. We don't need any of them.
The admin here takes a conservative stance on defederation. He doesn't do it unless there are lemm.ee rules violations or network abuse. I haven't looked at any explodingheads content, but if it does not violate any lemm.ee rules and presents no network abuse it will probably not get defederated.
I agree with lemm.ee's philosophy on defederation and that's one of the reasons this is my home instance. In general you can't call for defederation just because you don't agree with content. If it's blatantly offensive then I suppose that would be valid grounds, but I would hope that reason is used sparingly. I mean discussion that's offensive to you may not be offensive to me.