Yeah it's a weird internal problem. It has to exist for understandable reasons, but also naturally makes it so that nobody will want to join any but the very largest instance, automatically centralizing it all again.

Defederation makes it so that figuring out which instance to sign up with in order to see your friends and local businesses (since we're talking about vs Facebook instead of Twitter or Reddit) would be a nightmare for the average person.

I have multiple accounts on some services trying to get to everything I want to see. I mostly gave up on Pixelfed. My main Mastodon account can see people on other instances but has problems seeing their posts. And I'm absolutely not willing to troubleshoot it because between work, a social life, and other hobbies I just don't have the time or give a shit.

I like the fediverse. I'm here. I use it. But I'm only going to use what's convenient and I promise that I have more patience than the average non tech person who wants to sign up using a linked Gmail account and see all the things they expect to see without having to think about it.

Edit: I think my brain skipped the last two sentences in that comment. I just sat here and bitched about something that was already mentioned. I have brought nothing to this discussion and have brought shame upon my house.

No, it's not.

It's literally a concept no normie knows about nor would care about.

They are not trying to follow some tankie on a banned Marxist instance, they're trying to follow cute cat pictures on lemmy.world.

End of the day, just like with safe site filters etc, you'll end up with most instances following similar enough protocols and federating with each other and the vast majority of people seeing the vast majority of people, with some fringes blocked for some people.