Genuine inquiry . Maybe I am not experienced enough with the various federated platforms but I am an avid user of matrix, and have dabbled in lemmy. From what I have seen is federation is on the path to decentralization but not fully there. It creates fiefdom, little kingdoms . Great yes you may find one that suites you better, but users now can end up isolated to their island, switch island sure but now you are isolated for the previous island and maybe others. Its stupid. On matrix you need to know the other island(server) to even find its rooms(communities). Some rooms block users from one server while others block users of other servers. You either have to run multiple accounts or accept the limits. Add in you are at the mercy of your home server, you can lose your account have it immitated, and more. The performance is horrible not sure why, but content is slow to update and spread. Matrix has the problem because of its design most people are on the matrix.org server and so the point of federation is largely lost. They are moving to p2p where it seems the solutions for federation now dont apply.
Anyway why is federation not stupid? Are these problems only with Matrix? Cause I look at lemmy and it seems far worse.
I think instance blocking is pretty transparent, you can see the list of allowed and blocked instances under /instances. If admins do something you dont like, thats when you choose another instance.
Its funny that you mention how i “still get involved with users here”, because Lemmy is still really small when you compare it to Matrix or Mastodon (16k total users, less than 1k active in the last month).
Matrix uses a completely different protocol, so I dont think federation with them is realistic. And we definitely have enough work to do on Lemmy itself. But it might be possible to write a chat app using activitypub, or even as a Lemmy frontend as described in this post.
I am not arguing its not transparent just its not ideal. I think matrix users are way over stated.
Thanks