This is what I have been thinking!!!! Defederation is THE WORST feature of fediverse, and trust me, it will keep people away from joining the fediverse.
I just remembered that a year ago some artist I really liked joined Mastodon. I tried following it through my old account on kbin.social but somehow it doesn't work, no clear error message. After asking around I figured it out: turns out said Mastodon instance defederated from kbin.social, with no valid reason given!!
Because of shit like this, no wonder people--including tech-savvy person like me--are confused of choosing the right instance of Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. It's what makes the onboarding experience of Mastodon awful. It's what makes Mastodon losing users, IMO.
I would not even call it enshittification, this actually seems like a good trade off. How else they would make money? Ads? If they run ads that would be instant no from me
Sad that comment like this gets upvoted on a post about geniunely good project