Hey, I just randomly stumbled on this and thought I'd give you a reply, for what it's worth. We've got a whitelist because there are thousands of Fediverse instances out there and many of them host questionable content (things like loli porn). It's too much risk to ignore them, and too much effort to weed them out.
We've added everyone listed on join-lemmy.org who hasn't de-federated us. I guess if you're not on there then we just haven't noticed you yet. I've added your instance to our whitelist now.
If anyone else also wants to be added and isn't yet, please do reach out.
As you can tell by the comments in this thread, many people feel like they know us well based on what they have heard. I guess we are guilty of having a handful of members who used to be on the old exploding-heads instance, so we must be EH 2.0. All anyone would have to do is open our site and browse through the endless pages of shitposts for themselves to figure out how silly that is.
I think that was an old rant from before we were even federated, as to why I didn't want to bother at the time. It was an exaggeration, overall we've been getting along great with everyone else we've federated with since then.
I wasn't completely off base, for example a bunch of instances defederated us simply because we're "EH 2.0", even though they never interacted with us. At the time we were already defederated by a couple of the more zealous ones. The fine gentleman who runs Fediseer is recommending to everyone that they defederate us for being "chuds". It's all pretty childish.