this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Sure, I could, but for me the whole appeal of a federated service is its interconnected nature. If I have to create an account on the "right" instance to interact with all the communities I'm interested in -- potentially repeatedly, given that operators may choose to defederate from each other at any time and for any reason -- that has already defeated the purpose of the exercise.
I see this as a major driver of the "default instance" issue that both Mastodon and Lemmy have experienced. If you both have a hard time finding content off your home instance and have no guarantee of continued ability to interact with that content down the road, the safest choice of home instance becomes whichever is biggest, and from there the network effects just make the problem progressively worse over time. Federated services need some way to reduce the friction of traversing the Fediverse if they're going to avoid that.
I guess I disagree with your assertion as to what is the 'purpose' of the fediverse. To me choosing associations is the point, so admins disconnecting from abusive instances fits well within that belief. If the fediverse meant accepting all input from all instances without question, I'd leave here as quickly as I did voat.
I don't mind creating a couple accounts on different instances as need be. Though I'm also the kind of person who had a handful of reddit accounts for various purposes, so I understand my perspective isn't likely the norm.
I agree though that based on your requirements, spinning up your instance might be the best bet.
I don't disagree with your points, necessarily. I just think that the way most federated services function, there's no way for the needs/concerns/feelings/whims of an instance operator to be met without also impacting the users of their instance in ways that might not have been necessary just to protect that one instance. I only ever had one Reddit account, and thought of my post history as something of a corpus that represented me to those who might be inclined to look, so to me portability of my federated Identity is important -- without it Lemmy is just a bulletin board with extra steps. That said, it's clear that our user cases differ, and that's OK! For my part, I'm gonna keep trying to get this thing self-hosted...