Volpeon (@volpeon)

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.