How are you gonna prevent anarchy?
Cats and dogs living together...oh my. Let me clue you in on something. In free societies there's risks and individuals make bad decisions, and we live with it. We don't need someone policing everything.
Cats and dogs living together...oh my. Let me clue you in on something. In free societies there's risks and individuals make bad decisions, and we live with it. We don't need someone policing everything.
Ideally, there should only be a select few that determine which apps and programs should run for the masses. We should even control which software users have access to.. After all, giving the people too many choices leads to imminent danger on all fronts and is uncontrollable.
I'm increasingly convinced that there are a great many who relish the idea that the internet, privacy, software, and ultimately life should be state controlled, similar to China or North Korea, as long as It's their people making the rules..
It's 2018 and that would never happen though.
For starters, you say "free societies", but try to think deeper about what that exactly means. It's most likely a collection of nation states, each with its own governance and military and law. Everything around you works because of some sort of centralized authority.
Most people don't realize this--I myself who's a programmer probably would have died without knowing this if I didn't get into decentralized tech stuff--because they never needed to question why governments exist or why nations exist.
TLDR: Anarchy is likely to happen if there's no regulation. Even the Internet itself is regulated if you look into every party involved.
So within a project like Mastodon, they define goals; eg a spam-free network). Then, they theorize mechanisms to implement those goals; eg give users the ability to mute/ block spammers, and give instances the ability to boot spammers, and mute/ block instances infested with spammers. Then they code those features, roll them out, and see if they achieve the goal. Rinse, repeat. Pretty much the same process a centralized open source site like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Minds, or Yours would use.
Things get a bit more complex when Mastodon wants to federate with instances of software other than Mastodon (eg GNU Social). Fortunately in tech, we have other names for consensus and guidelines about inter-operation between different programs implementing similar features; protocols and standards. For example, the W3C Social Web EG got a bunch of folks together from projects that want to federate, and standardized a set of protocols under the name ActivityPub. Because this standard is written by people with experience dealing with Bad Actors in federated networks of their own software, they can share this knowledge, and follow a similar set of steps to those laid out above.
In contrast, FB at al are the worst of both worlds. They have total power to police anything, and the only way to hold them accountable is to abandon your data and your contacts on their platform and opt-out (thus #deletefacebook). They accrue more power and wealth the more users they have spending time on the site (abusively or otherwise), so they do the absolute minimum to hold Bad Actor users accountable, just enough to other users getting driven off the site. See how centralization doesn't really help here?