Usenet is another example of the problems with 0 moderation and federation. Sure, it distributed amazingly (many ISPs mirrored usenet data), but once spammers started spamming, it quickly died as a discourse medium.
Those with concerns over censorship need to face the fact that we've previously had 100% censorship free platforms and nobody uses them anymore. We dumped those platforms because of the lack of censoring, not in spite of it.
Heck, HN is moderated as well, I don't think most of us would be here if it was unmoderated.
There is a major difference between censorship and moderation though that is frequently conflated.
Censorship is blocking/removing speech as judged by its content.
Moderation is warning/removing participants based on their behaviour.
They're not mutually exclusive of course, but it's frustrating to see moderation projected as Big Brother, when it's actually an extremely useful and necessary too for civil discourse. Moderation can be very effective without making any decisions about speech content.
The line between moderation and censorship is rather subjective to the moderator's own biases, don't you think? I'm not saying we should be free of moderation, just that it's very difficult to keep it completely objective, especially if there's any politics involved.
Why the downvotes? Was my question difficult to understand?
How does spam work on a social-media-like system where you have to wilfully follow someone to start getting their feed? Do you volontarily subscribe to receive spam?
You are assuming integrity and good-faith participation of all systems involved. This is not a reasonable assumption in the context of service abuse. Account compromise and host compromise spring to mind as avenues for spam. All it would take is popping a poorly configured server and then spam can be injected into the feeds you've chosen to follow.
Usenet servers had admins and tools to deal with spam: cancel messages and in extreme cases the UDP. If you were on a decently run server it wasn't any worse than Reddit or HN even.
Usenet is another example of the problems with 0 moderation and federation. Sure, it distributed amazingly (many ISPs mirrored usenet data), but once spammers started spamming, it quickly died as a discourse medium.
Those with concerns over censorship need to face the fact that we've previously had 100% censorship free platforms and nobody uses them anymore. We dumped those platforms because of the lack of censoring, not in spite of it.
Heck, HN is moderated as well, I don't think most of us would be here if it was unmoderated.