i use the home feed

What I think could help against instance protectionism:

A.) Better moderation tools to protect against SPAM and trash

B.) Better curation algorithm, especially for smaller instances, to smartly curate posts that are relevant to the user

C.) Better default-values for the selected feed (All instead of local), as well as for the discovery of communities (which is also currently local by default)

If B is not realized, smaller instances will have no handle against big instances flooding their user's feeds with their posts and they will switch back to local-default again.

Overall, it can be brought down to making the All-feed more attractive. In my opinion, there should only be the subscribed-feed and an all-feed with curated posts (with different sorting algorithms to chose from in the best case). Or at least these should be the main ones.

If its possible to create your own instance and federate with any instance of your choice - are there any apps which include the ability to register your own instance with you as the sole user? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the underlying logic

Best take