The issue is that right now about a third to a half of the content is on instances which will ban you for random shit without notification. The only way to tell is to search that instance’s modlog, so you can effectively get shadow banned from half of Lemmy even while participating in the “free” half.

I agree that what you say is the longer term ideal, but it’s not how things currently are. I also don’t trust the .ml devs to not keep their thumb on the scale in various shady ways. They have shown themselves to be pretty shameless so far and there are plenty of ways they could quietly shape federated content by running a malicious fork. It already seems like they don’t federate much of their modlog, for example.