There are two points:
- Instance owners aren’t ready to be a community manager and moderator. Also, a big instance costs much more. Many people just want to pay their 5$ in month and passively make their contribution.
- Not all users are “power users”. They want to consume content. To make federation successful, we should provide a smooth UX. Balancers, meta-account, something like this. Smart enough to require only one click and utilize all available resources.
As I said, there is no profit from empty instances. Of course, the federation itself is good and fail-proof in this way. But if nobody asks for this cache, it’s just an Internet Archive of a sort.