Very true...as long as the federation of servers remains as it is now, but I'm increasingly worried it won't.

I mean, yes, Dbzer0 still exists, and yes, you can access it from other instances, but Lemmy.world is the biggest one and users here being cut off from it from here will strangle the amount of activity it gets. Visibility is important for the health of other instances and their communities. There's a good reason why alternative subreddits never outgrow the main ones.

There's also a sentiment among some admins and some of the contributors to both Lemmy and the Sublinks project that feels like it runs counter to the premise of Lemmy as whole: an unwillingness commit to a truly shared space or adhere to a standard for what federation is supposed to mean. Instances are not only encouraged to do whatever, they're being given more tools to. And that's good for fighting spam, child porn, and malicious instances, but it doesn't stop there.

I really hope an app or frontend comes along at some point that will seamlessly combine instance accounts and "fill in the blanks" created by instance admins so users can have a clear picture of Lemmy, regardless of the instance they're on.