@polotek The thing is, with Mastodon software, tools for controlling federation choices (both individually and at the instance level) are very limited in Mastodon. Allow-list federation at the instance level is strongly discouraged by Mastodon and cumbersome to manage; it doesn't exist at the individual level. Anything policy based, which is what you really need to make it scalable, isn't even a concept.
Which is a problem! But it's hard to resolve at the individual level ...
Other fediverse microblogging platforms all have blockers to broader adoption -- functionality isn't fully there yet, horrible UI, not a lot of support from hosting companies, etc. And with most of them, support for controlling federation choices isn't much better. So things are trapped in this weird suboptimal state; and most microblogging resources go to Mastodon, so it's been hard to break out of the cycle.
@polotek @tillshadeisgone