

But that has nothing to do with the size of an instance of community. Rather the opposite is the case: an instance admin might decide to silence an community or instance because it is too big/busy and drowns out all the posts from smaller instances.
Or a very practical example: those Reddit and RSS repost instances. We had to defederate them because they were drowning out all organic posts and discussions. I would have rather liked to silence them though as people might want to stay subscribed to them without bothering other people on the same instance by having them pollute the federated feed.
On Mastodon it is also commonly used to temporarily silence an instance that is being abused for spam. This is much better than to defederate, as it still allows people to continue communicating with legitimate users on that instance.





















I think Vernissage even added a migration option from Pixelfed lately.
I am also interested in some feedback on hosting it. I tried hosting Pixelfed a while ago, and while I got it to run, it was honestly quite annoying with lots of papercuts, so I retired it again shortly after.