The western hemisphere isn’t just the Americas. It includes half of europe…

“Half” is stretching it. More like a slice: UK, Ireland, Iceland, Portugal, Spain and a slice of France.

I think you’re getting hung up on the word “federations” (noun) instead of the adjective “federated”.

Who decides who gets to email who? The email provider admins. Should everyone be in a single email network/bubble since otherwise there is no communication? Mostly, yes. Do I need a separate account per email bubble? Per email bubble? Yes. But how many email bubbles are there? One? Whats the practical limit on number of providers per the email world? None, mostly?

Gmail does ban a lot of small email providers if they don’t seem “legit” enough. And that is where you’re onto something with the noun federations.

If a bunch of instances really disliked a different bunch of instances they can indeed severe each other from each other. The admins would do that. They put the other instances on a block list. Most Mastodon instances block Trump’s Lie ehm Truth Social etc. But otherwise you can talk from gmail to hotmail to mcselfhost, with one account.

Basically federation works based on a block-list, not a allow-list, unless the admins of the instance set it that way, just like email providers.

I hope you apply this same logic to Russia then too, or any other power block, for consistency’s sake.

The node-ipc incident going on clearly tells us West

Couple devs --> the West

Good one.

The simplest way to allow users to merge communities like this as they please, as opposed to having the moderators choose for them what communities will merge or having the communities auto-merge, or adding the topic umbrella over communities (which I think is an interesting idea), is to allow ”multi-communities” (like multireddits), so https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek+startrek@lemmygrad_ml+startrek@mywebsite_com would display all the community’s posts on one page.

Edit: To expand on how I see @Gwynne@lemmy.ml 's topic umbrella idea, each community would have a mandatory topic (not category, those already exist), that would by default be the same as the community’s name (but could be edited), and going to https://instance.tld/t/startrek would display posts from all the startrek communities on all instances.

I understand this is an advanced federation feature, so I don’t expect it made soon, I’m sure the devs have their hands full already, just an idea.