Exactly. Lemmy might give you the warning “This may be incomplete, view on the original instance”, but if the only posts missing are ones from defederated neo-Nazi instances, not seeing them is indeed a feature rather than a bug.

If things get big enough that hobbyist instance owners are getting overwhelmed, it might be a good idea to organize a nonprofit, under the NPR business model. Not collecting data or breaking your brain with advertisements, though periodically, they’re gonna have to go hat in hand, and beg users to feed their Patreon. Hey, I’m more than happy to throw a little in!

Nice thing about this business model is that being a nonprofit, the point of its existence is to fulfill its mission (to help independent distributed social media thrive), instead of to make money for owners/shareholders.

Might get to the point where anti-DDOS measures have to be used against AI scrapers.