Yes, but I outlined my reasons for wanting no defederation. VLemmy was perfect- refused to defederate, actively moderated- until the issue with image federation spooked him. Also, saying “illegal content” is a bit meaningless on a globally distributed platform. On both instances- feddit.nl and VLemmy- many users outlined very similar rationale to me when the issue of defederation came up, and you and I both know that defederation is not used only for unmoderated instances. Lemmygrad is aggressively moderated and defederated from most instances because the owners find the political views expressed there distasteful, and that’s not the only one.
It just introduces so much personal bias into the fediverse, where individuals who don’t like Thing A defederates from instances that allow Thing A, cutting their entire instance off from it. Again, yes, you can join other instances, but that quickly gets annoying trying to find another instance that aligns with your Thing A-positive or neutral views. This is what I’m referring to when I say that it will kill the momentum- users getting frustrated and having to make multiple accounts to essentially dodge a completely unjustified ban (assuming they weren’t the ones doing the Bad Thing that caused the defederation) will lead to burnout and lost user retention.
As I also said, there will certainly be an impulse to say “good riddance, we don’t need them anyway”, but I think it’ll lead to more problems. The fediverse has existed as a small pocket of internet for a while. However, things don’t shrink as easily as they grow. If lemmy continues to get time and money and resources poured into its development for an ever-shrinking userbase, it won’t just go back to how it was. Growth is hard to undo.