I completely understand why people would want a tighter instance. I started using Reddit significantly less awhile ago because a good chunk of the content and comments were either misinformed, malicious, or both. I'm hopeful that large instances can foster friendlier and healthier cultures, but right now I'm seeing so many people willing to make excuses for assholes and blaming the people that don't want to deal with those assholes.

Most people have no reason to care if a small instance decided to sail away.

They weren't a small instance though. They had pretty much established all of the default subs and then when they had like the top 10 largest communities on all of Lemmy they decided to start threatening defederating servers, closed their registration, and taking the largest communities away from them. Pretty much right as Lemmy was starting to build up some momentum essentially the largest instance was like "time to establish dominance and flex our power"

They've apparently defederated from 400 servers and still have 4 of the top 10 largest communities. Like yeah defederation is a tool of Lemmy but their using it like a threat and now they are demanding other instances follow their lead if they want re-federated. Then they try to boohoo about how running the largest subs with 4 mods is infeasible with the current tools and that's everyone else's fault.

Like Lemmy is barely off the ground and there's already power mods and they are already trying to control the whole thing.