Realistically most people aren’t going to make their own instance, so you kind of have to rely on the good will of others.
Purely as an example, let’s say that Lemmy world decides they no longer want to be federated with ML because of the Meta situation. If you’re on either world or ML now you’ve lost access to huge sections of Lemmy. This could basically go on forever, so any instance that wants to remain neutral can be locked out of either both or one of them as they keep defederating from instances until the whole thing becomes a walled garden, basically the same as if you upset a power mod on Reddit and lose access to huge sections of the site, except it’s worse on here because you wouldn’t even be able to lurk.
I guess you could just have multiple accounts, but we could easily see a situation where you need like 10 accounts just to see the most popular instances, which is obviously ridiculous and not practical unless you’re terminally online.
It seems like a pretty huge flaw in the system, to be honest. Theoretically it’s a good idea, but as more and more people flock to the large instances it seems like it’s only a matter of time before the power plays start to happen.
Is there anything at all to stop that happening? It’s seems inevitable to me that eventually the whole thing will fall apart if people abuse the system.