I wish I had some useful advice, but my knowledge of instances is fairly limited. I haven’t experienced any downtime over at lemmy.ca, but I really only use that one when lemmy.world is down, or when I’m trying to test federation issues. I also have an account at fanaticus.social, but that’s mostly for sports-related content. Not sure this community would fit in over there. I do have to say, the niche instances seem to be nice. But spreading the word might be a little tougher.
So, I’m answering this without all of the context. But I think that their statement could, potentially, make sense for some instances. I don’t think it makes sense for most/all general instances.
But imagine, for example, an instance whose sole purpose is pornography (seems like the easiest example). All communities created on that instance show pornography and nothing else. Now imagine someone joins that instance who is completely against porn, and all they do is complain about the porn and report posts for being porn. I think that the admins would be within their right to remove/ban that user for not aligning with their instance’s purpose.
Fanaticus has a pinned post about the issue, saying they were going to reach out to the lemmy.world admins to see what’s going on. I do think it just requires problem-solving, and isn’t intentional. But I guess I just don’t really know for sure.
It does sound like that. But it’s a sports-based instance. They just talk about football and baseball, mostly. I have no idea why they would have been intentionally defederated.
Woke up with a bit of a headache. But caffeine and Advil seem to be doing the trick. One more busy day to get through, and then we’ve made it to the weekend!
I really appreciate the detailed response!