I can see that working. Private instances that only invite truly trustworthy people are probably much lower risk, the only risk being account take-over and the static files are are not accessible by bots then the bar is set much higher.

I should clarify that I was referring to forums and IRC servers that anyone could join. The Mastodon model in this case would be public instances that are not strictly private and are linked to other instances. Private instances would be much safer. The risk of linked instances would map to the weakest link.

That's the solution to many of the decentralization problems; invite-only.

But people WANT the chance of winning the "lottery" as it were, and going viral.

You're not doing that in your small discord or private mastodon.

I completely understand and agree with their incentives. Those with the public instances will play the winning/losing lottery, losing being not managing the troll automated induced bad content fast enough. I encourage anyone taking on this challenge to first and foremost get some trustworthy non-toxic non-power-tripping moderators around the world for the "follow the sun" management of the instances.

Creating scarcity in access will lead to shared accounts, account re-sale, hacking, takeovers – all the classical account management problems.

Some of those will exist no matter what (Twitter accounts are unlimited and still sold) but - limited to invite only doesn't need to mean "limited as in scarce" - there's no reason to share an account if you can just invite the person, instead.

I've managed closed Fb group for ten years now. For new members we have a voting system in place. Inviting wouldn't work because if members could invite whoever they choose it will sooner or later lead to having members that not everybody is comfortable with. A friend of my friend may not necessarily be my friend. It'll create friction and lead to all sorts of interpersonal problems and soon enough it's not a peaceful community anymore, people start to block each other or lash out in comments just because their personalities or beliefs clash. I don't believe in invites anymore.

Google Wave and Googl+ also had invite system, it didn't work out well. Gmail is exception to the rule I'd say.

That's ONE point of federation, but the other is cross-instance discovery and communication. If that part is underused (blocked, disabled), there's very little point in using Mastodon. You can recreate this everywhere, including at Twitter, Reddit, Discord.

Right but at this point it's just fancy RSS feed with extra steps.

Not really, since you can still interact with content on other instances, not merely consume it.