Building up federation connections isn't hard. After about 2 months or so of operating a small instance (~10 users at the time, now about 80) I was federated wi

Building up federation connections isn't hard. After about 2 months or so of operating a small instance (~10 users at the time, now about 80) I was federated with most big instances and a lot of smaller ones. The instances that don't want to talk to your instance are generally not the kind of people you'd want to talk to either, if you're conservative you can generally talk to conservative instances and if you're liberal you can talk to liberal instances and if you're centrists/dontcare like my instance you talk to both (though my instance is heavily leaning on liberal we do have a few conservative instances in the mix).