But an instance is someone's ball the server, the domain name, the admin credentials, etc. We are guests here, including community mods. And the server admins as you say are volunteers. They shouldn't have to put up with bullshit just to please us. So any topic community like politics that generates disagreement will be precarious.

Starting a new instance isn't the answer because of siloing and network effects. So we need more of a peer to peer model than a federation of servers. Or anyway, put the federating onto the client side. I made another post about that earlier.

I don’t think it makes it unworkable, but I think it warrants a democratic process in this kind of decision making.

Without something to enforce that Democratic process, and with no incentive for instance hosts to commit to it, it's unworkable.

The issue with the whole platform, from the get go, has always been that without a central authority to hold it together, each instance is inevitably going do whatever it wants. The technology for Lemmy does not inherently solve the social issue. Defederation, as a concept, is antithetical to the ideal of the fediverse. But it's also necessary to keep it managed. As long as people can choose to, for any reason, they will use that tool.

I think a new solution needs to be proposed. Like...I don't know, floating communities or something. Communities that are not tied to any instance. Or perhaps instances that only host communities, not users. Just spitballing, I have no idea what can be done.

The way it exists now is not going to save us from another Spez, it's just giving us hundreds of mini-Spez's.