> rather absurd assumption that the only material that's being blocked ...
It's fallacious reasoning to assert that any system that is less than 100% perfect should be changed.
If the current system meets the community's expectations 98% of the time, and alternative systems meet the community's expectations 90% of the time or less, it would be silly to throw out the current system.
That's like saying stop signs at intersections should be removed because sometimes I have to stop when there are no other cars there, and sometimes other drivers fail to stop when they should, and some stop signs have been defaced or knocked down.
This point is pointless. The question is whether federation works, or whether it instead degrades into a short list of large providers.
It's amusing that the first response to that point being made is to miss it, and to somehow paint the isolation of smaller servers as a strength of federation (because it gives users control over what they see.) Then the next one is literally an argument that decentralization will inevitably centralize, because that centralization will satisfy the communities expectations 98% of the time.
The last paragraph wanders very close to claiming that it is childish and entitled to expect your decentralization not to be centralized. Doesn't that just enthusiastically reinforce idlewords's claim?
So, if certain minorities have more representation in crime statistics in an area, it is acceptable to have a bias in random searches towards them because doing so meets the expectations of the majority to have to deal with neither crime nor random searches compared to the alternative of unbiased searches which lower arrest rates and expose the majority to more searches?
Even putting aside the slightly absurd difference in stakes with my example, there's also the issue that you're just arguing for centralization, which defeats the point of a system designed for federation in the first place.
It's fallacious reasoning to assert that any system that is less than 100% perfect should be changed.
If the current system meets the community's expectations 98% of the time, and alternative systems meet the community's expectations 90% of the time or less, it would be silly to throw out the current system.
That's like saying stop signs at intersections should be removed because sometimes I have to stop when there are no other cars there, and sometimes other drivers fail to stop when they should, and some stop signs have been defaced or knocked down.