alt Hacker News> Every instance has their own policies. That's the strength of mastodon.
And its biggest weakness because instance admins keep bitchfighting with each other, holding their users hostage.
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Well in many cases this is justified. You can't expect them to federate with something like gab (for obvious reasons), or with threads from meta. That would just aid their obvious Embrace, Extend Extinguish play here.
And there are some groups like the German fediverse that stipulate a really long and very specific list of rules and block any instance that doesn't take these over 100% verbatim, no discussion allowed. Also a good reason most of them are blocked. We've had this issue before at the progressive instance I was on.
But besides that most of them get along well. Mastodon is strong on bubble forming anyway but I personally like that. I hate seeing a post from a trans friend on e.g. instagram and then see hundreds of Americans falling over themselves to spew trans hate. Even though the post had nothing to do with that. I think bubbles are necessary in today's online world because many people are just not worth talking to anymore.
They're just scared of getting fastroped and tear gassed and shot on the spot in their workplace to be then posthumously humiliated on TV as a hostile religious radicalist sympathizer engaging in trafficking of encrypted blasphemous drawings.
So they constantly engage in those ostentatious acts as almost a cultish rituals of its own to distance themselves from whatever it is.
Which is, frankly understandable. Behaviors of some of European counterterrorist units and NGOs/NPOs are rather unhinged. I would do the same if I were them. I'd even put up some religious symbols or donation receipts in the login page just to avoid giving them wrong ideas.
Just like HN and Reddit refuse to interoperate. But it's okay because you can just make a user account on HN, and one on Reddit.