I am intersted in some of their communities and i don’t want to create duplicates. Not a fan of duplicates for niche comms especially.
I didn’t have the impression that they were all that problematic when the defederation happened either, but i may have missed something of course.
The instance blocking feature you speak of only blocks communities, it won’t block users from the instance, it says this right on the change log for 0.19 on join-lemmy.org
So the deep cultural and behavioral problems with these instance aren’t solved by this instance blocking implementation like everyone says, it can’t be considered a replacement for defederation or moderation. I really hope that people, especially Admins realize this before making decisions to refederate, otherwise it could end badly.