federation is all to often at the whims of some admin in a pissing match with another server,

Yes, and that's kind of by design. The whole system is not designed to emulate large centralized social media, but to enable content syndication and synchronization across independent publishing platforms. Each site, then, is hosting and serving content published on other sites.

If a site admin decides they don't want to be in a contnt hosting agreememt with another, that's gotta be seen as OK. I wouldn't want to host most people's blogs on my website. Especially if the publishing site had a poor track record of content moderation.

But services like Mastodon bend over backwards to hide the nature of the fediverse, and make it seem like it's all one common place and experince. Most major fediverse platforms now fail to allow sufficient theming or site branding, and reinforce the idea that the local site's community is meaningless, and is to be ignored.

It bypasses the whole point, so that everyone can get all shakey trying to avoid the FOMO.