I think I've decided that Mastodon is a trash platform. It's honestly just a functionally centralized network run by a small group of woke ideologues masquerading as a decentralized network. Mastodon has too many utterly retarded design decisions to function well as a decentralized social media platform, and I don't think I'm going to keep my instance up. I may spin up a new one in the future to circumnavigate around the Fediblock lists I'm now on, but I don't think I'll post much of anything if I do. I may also try Bluesky if can be convinced that it lacks said retarded design decisions.
Any viable decentralized microblogging platform must disallow instances from blocking each other and restrict blocking to user-on-user blocking. I'm convinced of this at this point. The ability of instances to straight up to block entire, other instances will just inevitably lead to the development of something like the Fediblock lists. At that point the entire service will just become functionally equivalent to a centralized cool kids club, potentially run by a tiny group of ideologically motivated retards. And honestly, this just harms the network more than it helps it.
So yeah, I'll probably be taking this instance down pretty soon. There's no point in having it anymore if I can't see such a large proportion of the network anymore, and I can only expect to see less and less of it going forward. The devs just need to pull their fucking heads out of their asses and get a grip on what their goals even are. Because they claim Mastodon to be decentralized and distributed, but they simultaneously include design features that are completely antithetical to that goal. Theirs is just a deeply confused platform, and they need to overcome those confusions before they can expect people to take them seriously.