I disagree, federation should about joining things of value not about building a community with everyone at all cost except the most extreme ones. Every community should decide their level of participation in the world community, but it’s every bit is as valid if this community wanted to close down and allow nothing but discussions about bunny themed sweaters. Would that make it a huge, popular instance where people wanting to expand their world-view want to part their attention every day? Probably not. Would it be infringing on the rights of alt-left-right-and-sideways groups? Not in the slightest.

The whole point of a federated network isn’t that it’s one big decentralized network where every node is identical but just harder to bring down, it’s having a common link where you can join together however you like without the technical hurdle that exists for parking yourself on your device and checking twitter and facebook and reddit and mastadon and linkedin and a dozen disparate sites because all your friends siloed themselves in and you can’t communicate. Here your knitting friends could be on one instance, your biker gang is on another one, your DnD group is on another and aside from your skin-head cousin who you can’t see from ‘this’ instance because he’s on a platform this instance didn’t want to federate with, you can chat with them all. And if you want to chat with him too, you can find an instance that is wide open and join that one and decide if ‘that’ is the kind of experience you want to have. Or start your own instance and federate with ‘everyone’.

You have great points on making communities more inviting, but the fact is that your argument has to convince each instance individually and that is the downside and the great part of federation. One central authority doesn’t see your argument, decide you’re right and then force all users of all instances that that’s just the way it’s going to be from now on. Every instance can embrace your view or tell you to bugger off. That’s the freedom and benefit of the concept, not it’s weak spot.

Do the right-wing people deserve a chance to be heard and understood. more or less YES. But that shouldn’t force everyone and their dog to be the ones to give them that chance. There are people who have been abused by people like that their entire lives, there are people who would rather not listen to infantile profanity repeated in all caps filling up their front page. There are people who simply need a break from it or are just done with it. There’s nothing wrong with one instance out of thousands deciding to cater to those people, just like there’s nothing wrong with an alt-left site defederating with your sewing group because they think the content is boring and don’t want it cluttering up their bandwidth.

There’s room for everyone, while still giving people the right to choose where they site, and reserving the right for the people putting in their time and resources to chose who to defederate for any reason they like. If you or I don’t like it, there’s a nice list of alternatives.