Perfection is the enemy of good, I guess. The point is that you can federate, even though most will not know or care. mastodon.social could lock itself down for new users harder, but that would most likely just stop people from signing up to Mastodon at all.

This happened with lemmy.world and it’s not even official. Most people, including myself, will gravitate towards the most popular instance: like it or not, popularity and reputability are correlated. I joined Lemmy because it gives me the option to jump ship if necessary, not to join a random instance from the get-go based on a dice roll.

Fediverse isn’t perfect but it’s still better than all other social media platforms, everywhere else this is one solid circle of the company’s server