Currently my process for discovering what to follow is to look at the federated feed, looking at the local feed, and looking at hashtags - the parts of other instances I see on these views is limited to the parts of those instances being followed by at least one person on my instance, so if I'm on a small instance it's very unlikely that between the few dozen people in my instance that all of another small instance is covered - I'd like to just say, "merge bookwitty.social and mastodon.technology in my feed" or "search for #scifi on bookwitty.social and mastodon.technology".

Ideally, I'd like a seamless experience that allows me to see a "virtual instance" that is the merger of two instances. Like I said - I think the part that I see can be handled client side. Getting other people to see me, and having a portable identity, is another question entirely.