What it's about, in my opinion, is trust. To tie it back to Reddit yet again - on Reddit, if the admins of the site did something, their word was final and there wasn't much you could do about it. On Lemmy, if the admins of an instance do something, even here on the biggest one, their reach is limited to their own space; they cannot affect what happens beyond. This means that instead of having to do a big ol exodus to try and prop up a new network, people can just pick another instance and continue where they left off, outside the reach of the admins that did the thing they dislike.

Therefore, the instance admins and the users (and also the mods) need to actually have trust in each other to stick around, as there are viable alternative spaces they can go to if that trust is broken. Additionally, the entire concept of federation is also built on trust - "we will allow an exchange of content between our instances because we trust you".

I don't agree with this decision, but I understand it, and I still trust LW admins because they've had a good track record so far. For those reasons I'll stay here. I don't fault anyone leaving, though, if their personal threshold of trust has been broken. The only thing I'm really wary of is the free-speech absolutists that insist no one should be defederated from; the tool exists for a reason. There's not many of them, though.