The fediverse needs to find a way to abstract identity and consumption from content hosting before it can properly take off, imo.
As it stands, when joining as a casual user with limited technical knowlesge, you have to guess at which fiefdom is the best for you to join, and hope that your moderators are mature, even-handed and that nobody on your server does anything to get you defederated.
If things on your instance do go south, transferring hosts as I understand it is a pain in the ass, because you have to download your data off the server (assuming your account is still accessible), and then contact everyone you interact with (assuming your instance wasn't blocked by theirs), and tell them where you're moving to. Then you sign up for the new instance, upload your data, set a flag on your account to indicate that it's a transfered identity (optional). Fingers crossed your new host is federated with everyone you want to interact with.
Very good summary of some of the weaknesses in the Fediverse. Federated systems are not as good as fully decentralized ones. Today I'm starting a new experiment on my own web platform called quanta.wiki (I'm a Java developer) to investigate how to make it fully decentralized where everyone at least (at first) holds a copy of their entire fiefdom. Once the 'fiefdom' is not able to be shut down by targeting it's DNS name (hosting service), we can have a social media infrastructure that cannot be censored at all, like a blockchain.
As it stands, when joining as a casual user with limited technical knowlesge, you have to guess at which fiefdom is the best for you to join, and hope that your moderators are mature, even-handed and that nobody on your server does anything to get you defederated.
If things on your instance do go south, transferring hosts as I understand it is a pain in the ass, because you have to download your data off the server (assuming your account is still accessible), and then contact everyone you interact with (assuming your instance wasn't blocked by theirs), and tell them where you're moving to. Then you sign up for the new instance, upload your data, set a flag on your account to indicate that it's a transfered identity (optional). Fingers crossed your new host is federated with everyone you want to interact with.