Defederation should always be an extreme measure. Usually it's just the self-righteousness instinct trying to performatively obstruct other people. I usually find these discussions repulsive because of how people speak about each other (bitching about "tankies" or whatever and demanding that they be ideologically cleansed).

If we have more power to curate our own feeds, then there should be less defederation.

Yes, but users should be able to manually whitelist defederated instances so they can interact with such an instance, if they want to. Lemmygrad shouldn't be visible by default, but if you really like communist tankie shit, you should be able to manually allow it I guess.

I'll probably get downvoted for saying this, but in general I think defederation is against the free software ethos.

Free software is supposed to be about giving control back to the user, not the BOFH that happens to run the server they are using.

There's obviously going to be exceptions for illegal content, or actively trying to disrupt the lemmy network (by DDOS, flooding, etc) but I feel that's where the line should be drawn.