Think about it; instead of those in charge or the instances deciding who they don’t want to be federated with and thus restricting content for the users, it would be better if users were able to block entire instances instead.
We’d be able to curate our own browsing experience so much better without admin/mod drama influencing the rest of us.
Edit: Alright so maybe not exactly replace defederation, but it should still be an option available to us, and in general should become the default action before defederation IMHO.
The all feed would then be crap. I think you would have to filter or drop it.
Like the more control. You could never get rid of blacklisting or white listing as some stuff simply cannot be allowed on the node. On the other hand it could allow for more options in the gray area.
You may not want to under estimate the magnitude of the moderation issue too or the number of improvements needed or the lack of developers to address them. Lack of moderator actions federating is a good example and is just nuts. Frankly some sort of collaborative moderation would be great too.