I have limited agreement with your thoughts on defederation. The ability to defederate is important because there are instances that host csam and other illegal things. That content federating across all instances could put some instance owners in legal jeopardy and is undesirable even without legal considerations. Beyond filtering illegal content and large amounts of spam I prefer to curate my own experience. That’s why I chose lemm.ee. It’s a general purpose instance with a good admin that is generally well moderated. Lemm.ee doesn’t tend to cause problems for other instances so few instances have defederated from it and it basically only defederates instances that host illegal material or copious amounts of spam.

Not everyone wants that same experience though. The amount of political posts and doom posting can get overwhelming and depressing. Constantly seeing posts that challenge or attempt to invalidate parts of you identity gets exhausting. More controlled and curated instances can be a nice break from the full experience. Anytime I’ve interacted with beehaw communities it has been pleasant and much less stressful than the general lemmy community. I can understand why some users prefer to stay in that environment for all of their time on lemmy. This is ultimately recreation, users should enjoy their experience here. The same with blahaj, it’s nice to sometimes see content concerning minority identities without there being the same debates in the comments. When I interact with communities there and see how they talk about things I learn and grow as a person. Those discussions wouldn’t be possible on a less controlled instance.