- Use distributed, federated services like Lemmy, mastodon etc.
- Support the hosts with our own funds.
- Moderate our own communities.
The second point is the most important. Reddit happened because they are a corporate entity seeking profit. Let’s own our social media platforms by actively contributing funds to them.
There are unfortunately not enough people that hold this opinion, too many are trigger happy on defederating from those they don’t like.
Like you say, there can be some legitimate reasons, such as bot servers, and I would add if a big company created an instance to take it over and kill the federation.
But too many simply do it because they disagree with what the people in an instance are saying, and that hurts the federated nature of the fediverse.
I’m having trouble seeing the purpose of the federation system if not to cater what people see, to one degree or another. After seeing soft nazi rhetoric spread through years worth of complacency, the argument of “don’t get too banhappy, fellas, all ideas are worth considering” really doesn’t strike me as wise.