Clearly the real answer to this question is neither, and that Lemmy should incorporate a feature for automatically synchronising content between communities on different instances, in a way that reduces the duplication of data, if possible.

There’s little or no value in defederated social media if one instance hosts a number of large communities that all other instances depend on. It’s almost the same as the typical monolithic website with a public API model.

Genuinely, I think it’s probably because they feel a little guilty when they see you wearing one, and that’s uncomfortable for people, so they respond by taking it out on you.