You’re describing this like we all, individually, are blocking Hexbear users. That isn’t what happened. They were defederated by a handful of individuals. They were censored. An authority blocking your words from reaching others is censorship.
No it most certainly is not. Not by any legal definition of the word. Preventing people from speaking is censorship. that’s all. “forcing people to listen to you” isn’t free speech. And I’m not even going to bother going into the fact that free speech is quite LITERALLY in regards to government’s and have absolutely nothing to do with private servers like Lemmy instances.
As someone has already mentioned, the right to free speech is NOT the right to an audience. Just because you don’t agree with that statement doesn’t make it not true. Facts don’t give a shit about your opinion.