recent events with beehaw have shown that being on a large instance does not guarantee federation.

i'm all for roaming profiles even though i think the best option is hosting a personal or a friends-only instance - unless you're a colossal asshole nobody will defederate you, you're are not depending on anyone but yourself for your profile and subscriptions, etc etc. this obviously isn't for everyone but the barrier of entry is sufficiently low for people interested in tech and fediverse to do just that.

email has started as a fully distributed system but - for reasons too many to count here - ended up centralized over several huge providers, openly dictating rules to everyone else. i'd rather fediverse not followed this road.

Right. There are a bunch of instances being created by people leaving reddit. A lot of them are not likely to survive. And if that's where I created my account, it's just gone. I can't even access it from elsewhere in the fediverse.