I don't think this is a good idea. Keep in mind that different instances have different policies, moderators, and users. This leads to different rule enforcement, culture, and federation status. Even if a magazine/community has the same name and the same discussion topics does not mean it's the same group of people reading those posts (some might be, due to cross-instance federation, but not all will be). In short, they are different groups and cannot be treated as the same without pissing off people.
The proper solution is to let each community just evolve until one naturally emerges over time as the go-to community or they all differentiate themselves enough to be considered different (albeit with similar names). Adding a bot to cross-post content just slows that process down and makes the problem persist for longer. If a topic is truly small enough that getting enough people for critical mass is difficult (like your DIY cobbling example), then it shouldn't be hard to start a discussion in each of the separate communities to suggest assigning one as the "main" one and then just stop using the others. This is something that should be driven by the communities, not the software.
The first one that comes to mind is that defederation DOES stop your posts from going to Meta's platform when combined with the AUTHORIZED_FETCH server setting, while a simple user-level block may not. Depending on your server's settings, your posts may or may not be available on the open web where Meta could scrape the data - but this is still very different from them appearing in the feed or search results of, say, the transphobic, racist, or antisemitic groups that call Meta home.
This has serious implications for user safety and should not be overlooked. In fact, user safety is one of the biggest issues I have seen people mention when advocating for defederation.
Second: it's not yet clear if threads will allow their users to follow people on Lemmy or Kbin servers. But if they do, their users - including, for instance, the millions of followers of some big celebrity or politician - would be able to uprank posts and influence what you end up seeing. You might have LibsOfTikTok tell their users to brigade any posts critical of them, who knows. Meta's own algorithms could end up surfacing certain posts to their users, making the post rankings here largely a reflection of what Meta wants their users to see.
In other words, there's a lot more to the story than just 'blocking their content' when it comes to why you would want full defederation.
Here are a couple of blog posts that go into more detail around some of the data & privacy issues with federation:
No trying to be explicitly contrarian, but the EEE strategy (embrace, extend, extinguish) is well known by this point and it always ended up with the open standard not being used anymore and falling into irrelevance (as it happened to XMPP after google and Facebook embraced).
I do think it is a design failure, but it’s one that is necessary for it to be open: anyone can enter the space and build features on top of it. So they bring a lot of people, with features exclusive to them and then lots of people migrate because the experience feels broken if you can’t “florp” a post from someone else. It’s the nature of open source vs closed platform that enables the strategy to exist.
It may not happen this time, and I surely hope you’re right, but it would be a shame for the monopoly to win one more time when we had the chance do to something about it but we didn’t. Bringing more people do the fediverse sounds like a dream, but I’m not holding my breath expecting everything will work for the best. There’s a reason they’re doing this, it’s not because they need more users, they already have all of them.
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