Groups of defederated instances could then stay federated between each of them. Don’t you guys fear that this could cause at some point a lot of harm to Lemmy’s public image?
This has already been happening with Mastodon for years. It creates a need for instance admins to stay on top of defederating from those instances, and from instances that refuse to defederate from those instances. It doesn't particularly impact public perception of Mastodon overall.