I don’t think most people are going to take that second step though. Most people will look up the main website and choose something from there

I’m not sure this is user dependent considering this is on the admin docs page. For users to subscribe to a community on another instance, that instances admin has to allow federation with the other instance.

I just feel like the bare minimum is not strict enough; you could theoretically have an almost fully defederated instance while still having a listing and potentially getting user sign-ups from the lemmy home site.

I could in theory create two such instances, federate only with one popular instance, get both listed, then only federate with each other. Completely diminishes the default experience users will have on signing up to my instances

The screenshot is from this documentation page for administrating a lemmy instance