I don't think you've addressed my 2 core points:

1. ActivityPub is not a censorship-resistant network. Criticizing it for not being censorship-resistant is obvious, so what is the motivation for the criticism? Evangelizing FreeNet, pushing for a different federating protocol, or just shitting on AP users? I've mentioned FreeNet (which is almost 20 years old!) as an actual censorship-proof network, but you haven't seemed interested, which is why I'm continuing to question your intentions.

2. How do you treat users who want instance blocks and censorship for their community? Are they just wrong and haven't seen "the light"? Should we begin demanding churches host seminars on the two forms of Satanism, show 2girls1cup in high schools, and go to historical black colleges and shout the N word over and over? Because that's the meatspace equivalent of "no instance blocking" on ActivityPub, and local communities in society has found it healthy to limit content and speech to appropriate places. The indigenous and black ActivityPub instances aren't there to have "race debates" questioning their existence; they want to just talk with other cool people. Blocking helps protect them from groups of assholes who want to exercise their "free speech" by shouting slurs.

The rest of your posts haven't been convincing, either, because it's unclear what you're arguing for, besides just generically criticizing the protocol.

> The difference between local and remote in most AP software is minimal. Admins defederating is more a parental powertrip about which domains their users can or can’t read than anything.

> I think it’s the “free hosting” part that is popular, not so much the “admin powertrip” part.

Strongly disagree. Using highly charged words like "powertrip" make me think you've had a particular experience color your world view. Most folks I know don't want gablins and freespeechextremist filling up their boosts & timelines, and I can count on 1 finger in 2+ years of Mastodon of a user who later felt like they "missed out" because the instance they originally signed up for blocked another interesting instance -- which was rectified by them simply signing up on another instance and using Mastodon's move feature. That's not a high barrier and doesn't require alarmism.

> If this sort of thing were really valuable and popular, we’d see browser extensions that do it. For the most part, those only block spam and trackers, and don’t break HTTP along ideological grounds.

That ship has long sailed. It's not worth fighting. HTTP(S) is broken today on many different competing ideological grounds, the most obvious of which is The Great Firewall, and the most mundane of which are company ACLs/Firewalls (which usually give an ideological reason why they are banned - like "no games at work").

> They also aren’t only censoring from their community. They are censoring their own users’ posts from the entire set of users on the instances they have blacklisted. The censorship cuts both ways.

Yes, that's the point of doing an instance block. I don't see how this relates to the thesis of your argument (and I've honestly forgotten what you're arguing for).

> What about readers who don't want some stranger deciding what they can or can't read?

This is a ridiculous question, and betrays the amount of thought put into your argument.

Everything you read, except you reading your own original unpublished writings, is somehow manipulated by someone else. Full stop. "Why was it written", "who affected how it got published", "who put it into a book / online", "who affected how I acquired the book / visit the website", "who influenced me to not read a different book", "who edited this book or article".

The answer to this question is equally ridiculous: run your own instance, or get off ActivityPub and go back to the deceptively-open centralized silos where everyone is, go to the ideologically-pure FreeNet where almost no one is, or do <something else>? And don't forget to subscribe to every newspaper and buy every book -- don't let one's own lack of time cause accidental self-censorship.