"Email is the example I give people of how federation could work"
That presupposes that federation is actually a goal and not a means to an end. It's amazing how great developers are at not understanding what creates value. Twitter's value is _reach_. Get 400M users in one place, hook them with interesting content, server them ads, nudge them to sign up, track their engagement to make the platform sticky and attract more contributors. Any censorship that has been done has been for one and only one reason and it's protect the value of the platform. Primarily to advertisers, but also to users because users make the platform valuable. Decentralization deliberately cripples the main value of the platform (reach) in exchange for what exactly? Lack of moderation?
If you want decentralized, uncensorable communities, we solved that 30 years ago with usenet. Or, like you said, you can't be banned from email or running your own website. That's always been the case. People still write blogs. Yet Twitter sold for $44B and Tumblr was sold for $3M. Why? Because Twitter has reach.
And, conversely, optimizing platforms for advertising cripples them for the users. And there's a lot more users, so if this is an either-or, it's clear where the balance ought to be.
That presupposes that federation is actually a goal and not a means to an end. It's amazing how great developers are at not understanding what creates value. Twitter's value is _reach_. Get 400M users in one place, hook them with interesting content, server them ads, nudge them to sign up, track their engagement to make the platform sticky and attract more contributors. Any censorship that has been done has been for one and only one reason and it's protect the value of the platform. Primarily to advertisers, but also to users because users make the platform valuable. Decentralization deliberately cripples the main value of the platform (reach) in exchange for what exactly? Lack of moderation?
If you want decentralized, uncensorable communities, we solved that 30 years ago with usenet. Or, like you said, you can't be banned from email or running your own website. That's always been the case. People still write blogs. Yet Twitter sold for $44B and Tumblr was sold for $3M. Why? Because Twitter has reach.