You can download everything in your account with google takeout

I don’t like the idea of coalitions at all. To me it feels like the coalitions would become very “us vs them”, i.e. you must defederate all instances that allow any topic in this list or we will defederate you. It leaves no neutral ground, creates echo chambers, and deepens the political divide that plagues our society.

IMO it’s better if

1. Lemmy allows individual users to block all communities from an instance or all users from an instance, sort of like defederation but per-user.
2. Instances have the rule that “when you interact with other instances/communities, you must follow all their rules, or we will suspend your cross-instance posting rights for X days”.

Then instances can act like neutral infrastructure/identity providers and each user can decide exactly how they want to interact with the fediverse without causing fragmentation.

Let’s wait for per-user instance filters to be implemented, then everyone can block instances to taste. As long as their users don’t cause trouble in our communities, there’s no need for our instance to act as a moral guardians and decide what our users can and cannot see. Defederation is a nuclear option that should only be done if their instance is disrupting our instance’s operation (spamming and breaking rules while in our communities).

I like that sh.itjust.works currently federates with almost everyone, and I can see a big part of the fediverse from here. It would suck having to visit multiple instance to see the whole fediverse.