It's not about friends and morals though, it's about data, open standards, and what you want the net to be.

If John's fascist friends have very strong views about the way they want the friends of their friends to interact, and the vast resources to influence John into the trajectory that aligns with their desires, then perhaps a refusal to interact with John is the only option for someone with no resources. It's the paradox of tolerance.

Take for example Google Chrome, at one time it was a plucky little open source competitor to the established browsers interacting with open standards. Now they're killing ad-blocking. This wouldn't have happened if no one had switched to Chrome. I personally can't control what browser everyone else uses, but I can choose which browser I support.

What I'm wondering is go fat would that go. You could have an instance that defederates from an instance because it's federated with another instance that is federated with Meta. And so on and so forth. To me that will just create a group of instances that aren't federated with anything else...

A big part of the reason yes, but I think advertising has an insidious role also.

Lemmy instance admins have no financial interest in user's time on site. There's no outrage machine to drive engagement.

More people, introduces different problems.

For example, not having enough people engaging in a more niche community is a HUGE problem, which can only really be fixed with more people.

i mean if you want a social media network to grow....