>  Minds could be categorized as a "free speech zone" social network which
> are typically popular with fascists so count me out.

Fascism and freedom of speech are entirely incompatible and antithetical to
each other.
It could be true that fascist today use free speech platforms, but it is
certainly not what they desire.

From reading from the FSF/GNU websites, it has always been my impression
that freedom of speech is valued by the free software community, in a way
it certainly is not by fascists.
Indeed, filtering what one reads and publicly writes through the erratic
whims of some corporation, typically guided by capitalist interests and the
need to applease advertisers, as it usually happens on most platforms (such
as X and Facebooks), implies restricting one's behavior in a way akin to
what proprietary software leads to.

> The licensing of the minds project is also questionable.

Elgg dual-licenses the project, except plugins, under both the MIT license
and the GPL 2.
Obviously, if someone uses the whole of Elgg, they effectively have to use
it under the GPL 2.

Now, I agree with the GitHub comment, on the Elgg issue, that you
referenced. Indeed, if Elgg is packaged with GPL-2.0 only plugins, it must
have the GPL-2.0-only license (as a package).
However, the issue is specifically about the identifier of the license for
the whole package (for automated tools), which is not what is in question
here.

If someone uses Ellg without plugins, they can do so under the MIT license,
which is, of course, AGPL-compatible.

The project which is actually derived from Elgg is:
https://gitlab.com/minds/engine

Indeed, the situation wasn't clear to me at first, so I asked.
Minds is using the portion of Elgg which is released under the MIT license
and is complying with the MIT license (in a way my dumb self didn't notice
because I looked everywhere except the LICENSE file, which I assumed to be
just the text of the AGPL): https://gitlab.com/minds/engine/-/issues/2647

I do have some issues with Minds, but as far as licensing is concerned, in
relation to Elgg, it seems fine with me.