I can understand part of the motivation for doing this, but does this not immediately make it significantly harder for users to evaluate an instance and make decisions about whether or not to join an instance based on what other instances it allows/blocks?
If I’m understanding this change correctly, it would hinder user’s ability to find an instance that’s well-aligned to them because no one (including potential new users) will be able to see one of the most important metrics governing how an instance chooses to operate (what it federates and defederates with).
If you think the only topics of conversation we need are Politics, World News, & Technology, then we don’t need more people here.
Personally, I don’t like having to keep going back to Reddit for everything else. For other communities to be successful on Lemmy, we need about 2 orders of magnitude more users.
Are you content to have meaningful activity in just a small handful of generic topics? I’m not.
So, yes, we really do need more people here. A LOT more.