Let's start from the fact that "decentralization" in "moderator of server you've chosen to dwell decides what you can see and what you can not" is terrible idea from the get go.
Whether decentralization for social twitter-like sites might work is up to discussion, but Mastodon is just bad try at that.
You're trading consolidated moderation by one rule for thousand little fiefdoms, each with different rules and waging ban war on eachother. Empower the users to filter and pick what they want to watch, not moderators
> Empower the users to filter and pick what they want to watch, not moderators
I can imagine a friends and family instance that solves this: only invite people I wouldn't need to moderate.
Honestly, though 1 person per instance makes more sense to me. There needs to be a way to drive the (time and money) cost of hosting an instance to zero.
There probably also needs to be some sort of web of trust style reputation system. (Or just a way to whitelist users instead of blocking them.)
Frankly distributed social medai should be more akin to Google Reader and less of what Mastodon tried to be.
Like, have server have its users stream, still allow moderators to block incoming comments on that (aside from mod ego trips bad actors will always exist), but allow user to subscribe whatever they want without mod touching that path. So say mod would be allowed to block @server or user@server and that would cut that from public stream but not from people that subscribed to the guy or to feed from that server's public streams.
That way you can as mod still choose to not have politics poison your stream of dunno, amateur woodworking twoops, but it doesn't infringe on your user's freedom to see and talk with whoever they want.
> There probably also needs to be some sort of web of trust style reputation system. (Or just a way to whitelist users instead of blocking them.)
Frankly blockchain here would be the sole case where that technology might've had any benefit, even if blockchain was just used to store user's identity data and facilitate profile transfer. Maybe separate one if some servers want to make a blocklist in "if at least X out of Y servers see user misbehave, permaban" way. But eh, what stops someone from making 20 accounts on 20 different federated servers and report same post ?
Distributed reputation is hard. "just" downvote/upvote karma system is frankly silly to be anything else than brag number, as essentially you just need to make popular post to counter few unpopular ones. I think there should be a system to attach up/downvote count to a post, that makes it easy to cut on low effort/dumb content without much mod input, but making that not be gamed cross-server would be hard.... and per-server score is less and less useful the smaller server is/
Whether decentralization for social twitter-like sites might work is up to discussion, but Mastodon is just bad try at that.
You're trading consolidated moderation by one rule for thousand little fiefdoms, each with different rules and waging ban war on eachother. Empower the users to filter and pick what they want to watch, not moderators