Instances don’t have to be federated and instances federate and defederate from each other often enough. The goals of instances may not align, and to keep conflict low(er) it’s better if some instances cut ties.

TBH, this sounds like a technical issue between ml and nl.

While I thought it was basically an on/off switch for defederation, I suppose there could be a way to block updates from instances without fully defederating.

I am not going to get into the drama, but ml is defederated at a little higher frequency, but it’s not as high as some others. It’s because reasons, and is not relevant to this particular thread.