And please, PLEASE don't conflate this with a desire for more popularity of the platform. I couldn't care less about that.
Moving forward also means making things better for people who are already here. And don't tell me you're happy with that sword of Damocles over your head that is "your instance admin didn't handle this situation well."
Your whole social graph shouldn't hinge on the behavior of one person you may not even know.
In a way, this arrangement is even worse than Discord because a "server" admin messing up and getting a "server" banned you're on doesn't mean you'll lose the ability to contact other people with that account ever again.
The whole point of a decentralized network is to be more resistant to this sort of dynamic.
I think the problem holding back fedi the most right now is the instance = community mindset.
It is hostile for users because when joining, you have no way to know all the relationships and dynamics between instances going on here.
After you joined an instance, it might turn out half of the fediverse defederated from it. Or somewhere down the line your admin might get caught up in a dispute and suddenly many of your connections are severed, for reasons entirely outside of your control. How can you blame anyone for feeling frustrated about all this bullshit?
Even this aside, instance = community doesn't really make sense to me. I'm an artist, I'm furry-adjacent, I'm interested in software development, and more. Why am I forced to pick one of those when looking for an instance to join?
This is, in fact, one reason why I self-host.
Instances should just be nodes in the network responsible for hosting accounts and handling messages. Communities, instead, should be an abstraction independent of specific nodes, but of course still with rules and community moderators who enforce said rules.
With this approach, moderation decisions wouldn't mean permanently severing connections outside of the community's scope. It would resolve a lot of the pain about using fedi.
Volpeon