Ah, I see, I thought you were talking about technical difficulties or instances being hard to find, but you rather meant habits or mindsets making it hard. I really get that.
But then it’s cool that so many people still decided to join the fediverse, which is, after all, a way smaller network than the big corporate platforms. 😃 Maybe this habit of going for big numbers changes when people get used to the fediverse.

I also get the FOMO due to defederation thing, it definitely makes sense. But imho spreading out over several more instances could even help here.
Defederating will always exist, but if there are a lot of small instances and one of them decides to block another one, people on this instance would only lose contact to a fraction of the total content of the fediverse.
However, if there are only a few big instances and one decides to block another, people would get seperated from a whole lot of content.

I do see the issue, however, that if you are interested in some specific communities that are on a specific instance and yours, for whatever reason, decides to defederate just from this one, you would lose contact to exactly those communities you follow.
At least I think that’s the way it is. It could also be that you could still follow the communities from a blocked insance and still post and see the majority of posts in it, but you just don’t see posts and comments from users of the blocked instance. I really don’t know.
Either way, Lemmy and kbin are both in early developement stage and if this issue exists there might be a solution for this in the future. 😃
And let’s say the problem does exist and you don’t want to stay on an instance that’s blocking your favourite community, I think emotionally it’s easier to move from one small instance to another small one than it is to move from a big to a small one. 😊

Genuine question, why is it hard?

Here is a small list of instances if you two want to look into it some more. :) I wouldn’t recommend joining bookwyrm.social though, as it’s the biggest one and can be a bit slow sometimes. Also, it’s more in the spirit of the fediverse to spread out over several smaller instances. :D

She wouldn’t need to host her own instance. Like for Lemmy, kbin or Mastodon there are plenty of Bokwyrm instances with open registrations for everyone.
And they all federate with each other and the rest of the fediverse. Which is also good, because books have to be added to the instances manually, but thanks to federation there are already many books added that also federeate between instances (sometimes you just have to import the full book data from elsewhere with one click). Only if it’s a very niche book you might have to add it completely, which is fun though imo, because it helps Bookwyrm grow.
And there is the possibility to import your reading data from Goodreads. :)

There is Goldfish, which was started with beeing some sort of TikTok alternative in mind. But it’s stuck in a very early stage and doesn’t seem to be developed anymore. If I remember correctly the Admin started it as a practice for themself to get more into Activity Pub.
They have a Mastodon account and a github page, maybe you can ask them there if they plan to develop it further. And since it is open source and can be forked by anyone and everyone can contribute to it, maybe someone will be found who is interested in continuing to work on the project.

On Goldfish’s github page I also found Vidzy by accident, where developement seems to be more active. However, I found no active instances so far where one could test it.

And this is where federation and interoperability becomes nice imo, because one doesn’t have to use pixelfed and can still get content from Pixelfed in their Mastodon feed, if they want to.

Say someone would like to see the content of just a few Pixelfed users, but doesn’t want to create an own Pixelfed account just for that, one can just to follow those specific Pixelfed users with their Mastodon account to see the Pixelfed posts in their Mastodon home timeline.

I think it’s also worth mentioning here that, since both pixelfed and mastodon belong to the fediverse, you can follow pixelfed users from mastodon and vice versa and see each others posts. :)
That’s why the whole carrying over the people you follow stuff is a thing.

Für kurze Strecken das Fahrrad, vor allem, wenn ich durch den Wald fahren kann.

Für längere Strecken der Zug aus ähnlichen Gründen, wie du es beschreibst. Ich liebe es einfach, mich dort zurücklehnen zu können und mich um nichts kümmern zu müssen. Die vorbeiziehende Landschaft zu beobachten, Podcasts oder Musik zu hören, zu lesen, die Augen zuzumachen… :)

Ich glaube leider, dass sogar kompetenteren Leuten als Scheuer die Unterscheidung da immer schwerer fällt.

Yes that was the point I was trying to make. He is hoping for success and growth of his brand / software no matter at what costs this might come. Also I think it is very naive of him to believe that Mastodon would benefit of a cooperation with meta in the long run.
And in his hope for fame for his brand and his own instance he doesn’t seem to care for smaller instances or the fediverse in general and the other fediverse software.