basically opt-in federation per follow, one step before full defederation
Sounds neat! I think as Lemmy grows we’ll see better solutions than plain defederation.
With the centralization we have wrt lemmy.world you cannot do something of that scale without significantly hurting your view of the threadiverse (and there are instances, most famously Beehaw, who have found that an acceptable compromise)
I think cases of Beehaw and hexbear shows that instances can be defederated from .world and still be successful.
I myself won’t lose much if my instance for some reason would defederate from .world, since I follow only a handful of communities and their users aren’t that active outside their instance actually. The problem with .world is that most of communities hosted there are clones of subreddits, and people are pretty toxic there too.
The community/group aspect of Lemmy also amplifies this centralization even more compared to Mastodon which does not have that functionality
We still can have many communities of the same topic though. It would be neat to have the ability to ‘merge’ communities in my feed.