I think the way federation currently works spells doom for the fediverse, should any service of it get major traction. Currently, if you subscribe to a community on Lemmy or follow a user on Mastodon, your instance will pull the content of that instance/user and make it available for all to see and interact with. What seems like a good idea to spread content however is becomming the achilles heel of the fediverse: The admins of Lemmy/Mastodon instances are liable in many juristictions for the content their servers are distributing. This means in practice that many Lemmy/Mastodon instances block NSFW content for example, as the admins, understandably so, are either unwilling or incapable of making sure they are not running afoul of any laws.
As such, I think that the fediverse needs to offer a way for users to follow content from other instances without having that content be stored, let alone shared by their home instances.
A question I have at this point is where this criticism is best levied against. Is it the job of Lemmy/Mastodon to provide such a form of federation, or does the ActivityPub protocol needs to be ammended?
It's not bad design though. What it does is make users, like you and myself responsible for our user experience. If you want a server that allows everything find one, if you want a conservative one, find one. If content creators want to join the server with the biggest reach in order to peddle their wares, fuck them. The fediverse is about communication not validation. It's why so many companies find themselves defederated on mastodon before they get started. Your mindset is that numbers equal success and everything should be just like it was, but mastodon doesn't want to be Twitter and Lemmy doesn't want to be Reddit. In the same way that those two companies are flushing their services down the toilet, the fediverse protects against that by leaning into the idea that once it's on the Internet, it's there forever. There's nothing wrong with expecting users to form relationships of trust with their admins and taking responsiblity for how that manifests
Server admins having to disable the very thing that makes the fediverse the fediverse to shield themselves from liability is by definition bad design.