I'm not saying that it's not open source, I'm saying that I would argue it's not federation anymore. Open source is irrelevant here, I'm not talking about the code.

I'm saying instances being "Closed to federation by default" and "whitelist only" is not true federation in my book.

I also am saying that instance owners are the ones who all of a sudden get a ton of power, specifically larger instance owners because they can decided arbitrarily not to federate with an instance they don't deem worth federating with. The larger userbase aside, instance owners I believe can become power hungry and greedy and refuse to federate.

For example, even I, a teeny tiny instance owner, felt a pang of annoyance when someone created a duplicate community on their instance. It was fleeting and I told myself that that's what the federation is, and that it's okay, but not everyone will react that way. It's inevitable that larger instances will say things like "Why should I federate with you, we have all of those communities over here"