Think about it; instead of those in charge or the instances deciding who they don’t want to be federated with and thus restricting content for the users, it would be better if users were able to block entire instances instead.
We’d be able to curate our own browsing experience so much better without admin/mod drama influencing the rest of us.
Edit: Alright so maybe not exactly replace defederation, but it should still be an option available to us, and in general should become the default action before defederation IMHO.
Nah. That’s getting into arsehole filter territory. The only drama about this you will see will be incited by its users.
A current issue is that defederation is the only tool for both purposes. The only possible way for a user to not see content from a certain instance is for their admin to defederate from it.
With the features separated, much fewer instances would need to go through instance admins but that doesn’t mean none of them should. There are instances that are just generally disagreeable/unethical. Fortunately only a few but they do exist.
our opinions on what constitutes an arsehole might differ.