Seems to me the fear of overloading one instance over another will not happen after all.
But I do hope the Threadiverse can hit 500,000 consistent active users by the end of summer.
Give me that hopium guys! 💉
Not de-federation for political reasons is a personal preference
There is also defederating for legal reasons.
You may not want to risk someone on your instance subscribing to a community on some other instance that publishes content illegal in your jurisdiction and have your instance keep a copy of it.
This is honestly one of my biggest fears, as an instance owner, because it’s really hard to stay on top of this. Unless you only explicitly federate with known-good instances, the likelihood of this happening is very high.
That’s why strong moderation is so important. These wide-open instances (even lemmy.world is too lax on account and community creation) are a major risk.