Well in many cases this is justified. You can't expect them to federate with something like gab (for obvious reasons), or with threads from meta. That would just aid their obvious Embrace, Extend Extinguish play here.

And there are some groups like the German fediverse that stipulate a really long and very specific list of rules and block any instance that doesn't take these over 100% verbatim, no discussion allowed. Also a good reason most of them are blocked. We've had this issue before at the progressive instance I was on.

But besides that most of them get along well. Mastodon is strong on bubble forming anyway but I personally like that. I hate seeing a post from a trans friend on e.g. instagram and then see hundreds of Americans falling over themselves to spew trans hate. Even though the post had nothing to do with that. I think bubbles are necessary in today's online world because many people are just not worth talking to anymore.

> And there are some groups like the German fediverse that stipulate a really long and very specific list of rules and block any instance that doesn't take these over 100% verbatim, no discussion allowed.

Yeah guess what, I'm German LOL that's why I wrote this post

> Also a good reason most of them are blocked.

Well the problem is, it's still annoying from a user perspective - I don't care about the problems other instance admins have with the admins of my instance. And no, I don't want to maintain a dozen accounts just to make sure I can interact with everyone I want to.

> I hate seeing a post from a trans friend on e.g. instagram and then see hundreds of Americans falling over themselves to spew trans hate.

yeah the commercial social networks are just another level of shittiness, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of these "Americans" are just Russians in disguise.