> And even though some are only "silenced", if you happen to join an instance that is blocked by a lot of other instances, then nobody will see what you are writing.
If you are on a "silenced" instances you can still be directly followed by users on the instance doing the silencing and they will see all of your posts on their Home timelines. From what I've seen, any boosts/replies by those users following you to your statuses still make those individual statuses eligible for them to show up on Federated feed on that instance, even if your every post is not eligible.
Arguably the game is the same whether or not you are on a majority "silenced" instance: the more people that directly follow you the more likely you show up in people's Home timelines and thus the more likely you show up in Federated feeds. You don't necessarily need to know if a remote instance is silencing your instance if you make enough friends on that instance that are directly following you.
I'd also argue that worrying about which Federated feeds you show up on is counter-productive in Mastodon. As with Twitter, it's better to reach users in their Home timelines, with direct relationships, or in some cases on Local Timelines for interesting interests, than to ever count on Federated feeds. Many instances the Federated feed isn't that useful (too busy, for instance) and people don't bother checking it anyway. (My main account is currently the only user on a small instance and the Federated feed is mostly repetitive with stuff on the Home feed and so I check it very irregularly.)
Instance "suspensions" obviously are a different matter entirely, but I don't feel like it is worth worrying about "silences".
> It almost seems to me that I really need multiple accounts on multiple instances to ensure that I can get what I want -- but since the client is tied to the instance (as a web sever), that's a difficult trick...
It's easy enough to just open multiple tabs in your browser and tab between them, if that is what you want to do. There are also some native clients with good multi-account support.