I think it's necessary to separate technical problems from social ones. If necessary, the protocol can be changed to scale better (Mastodon is trying to be nice to respect a pre-existing standard, but if that standard crumbles, it's fair to come up with a better one, and IMHO it is solvable).
Mastodon from the start wanted to tackle the social part of the problem about the fundamental disagreements about moderation. There's a wide spectrum between people who are keen to start Internet fights, people willing to tolerate that in the name of "free speech" principle, and people who just want to have a nice place where they can hang out without randos demanding they "debate" their right to exist.
These groups will never agree what level of moderation is appropriate. Even within Mastodon communities it's controversial what the rules for federation, bans, and content warnings should be.
Twitter, Facebook and others begrudgingly ended up being arbiters in political culture wars and must en masse decide what is acceptable to say. This ends up being an absurd situation where they try to balance the amount of abuse to an advertiser-acceptable level.
Mastodon's answer is that you can moderate your community however you want, and cut off whole parts of the network you don't like. This is ridiculed as "bubbles", but if you don't agree — make your own anything-goes instance!
It doesn't work quite well. There's still a lot to work out, but I think it's a better starting point than pleading with a billion-dollar enterprise to police the content in the way you think is right.
If you post on your own anything-goes instance, you will probably be defederated from your friends who are posting on normie instances. You don't have a choice but to go to a normie instance yourself and adjust your content and following to suit the instance's rules.
But it's not society setting the rules it's a small subset of earlier admins who created some of the first popular servers. They are in no way representative of society.
Nobody should be forced to publish my garbage if they don't want to. OTOH when people think their instances are moderating too heavily, they can move to mine.
Mastodon from the start wanted to tackle the social part of the problem about the fundamental disagreements about moderation. There's a wide spectrum between people who are keen to start Internet fights, people willing to tolerate that in the name of "free speech" principle, and people who just want to have a nice place where they can hang out without randos demanding they "debate" their right to exist.
These groups will never agree what level of moderation is appropriate. Even within Mastodon communities it's controversial what the rules for federation, bans, and content warnings should be.
Twitter, Facebook and others begrudgingly ended up being arbiters in political culture wars and must en masse decide what is acceptable to say. This ends up being an absurd situation where they try to balance the amount of abuse to an advertiser-acceptable level.
Mastodon's answer is that you can moderate your community however you want, and cut off whole parts of the network you don't like. This is ridiculed as "bubbles", but if you don't agree — make your own anything-goes instance!
It doesn't work quite well. There's still a lot to work out, but I think it's a better starting point than pleading with a billion-dollar enterprise to police the content in the way you think is right.