Thank you for the well thought out reply! I understand now that its not the way Lemmy devs envision this particular part of the fediverse to develop. It doesn’t completely agree with what I see in the current federation landscape though: Most communities cluster around shared interest, be they language, nsfw vs non-nsfw or ideology. Following that, there is a clustering effect regarding the communities on each instance: If I find an instance with a community I care about I’m pretty likely to be interested in the other communities on there too. My guess is: A popular app will implement this feature and it will become mandatory for everyone else who wants downloads. But I get the “idiomatic” argument and understand why Jerboa devs are unlikely to want this feature.
Sounds very similar to the old Soviet pacemakers with radioisotope batteries. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, records about them got lost and so a bunch of people have been buried with pretty radioactive stuff in their chest. I don’t think we (as developed societies) are going to take that risk for some phone batteries…