Comment by thinkingemote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thinkingemote | Hacker News Reader

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The federation aspect is the most interesting to me and has the most potential but it also the least important to most users. So much so because moderation issues, computing power and maintenance and simple powerful network effects all point to centralisation.

That's what we are seeing, people are choosing one thing not a federation of things.

There needs to be some reason and big benefit that people get for choosing federation. The only thing I can see would be if there's some kind of major and controversial moderation defederation event (e.g. a cancel culture controversy) but very soon before people get entrenched in their patterns and can see why federations are useful.

Possibly then, having instances run by media organisations might actually show the difference in moderations in the fediverse.

Out of the things you listed, moderation is for sure one that gets harder to deal with the more centralized the network becomes. All large instances have comparatively bad moderation, and that's a fairly well known fact among the older users.

For what it's worth, moderation is the best thing about fediverse. So many communities that have grown up there over the years couldn't have done it without decentralized moderation.

And it's not like there hasn't been a "some kind of major and controversial moderation defederation event" - there have been several. There are several collections of instances that are fairly closed off from the wider network. And honestly, that's fine. If some people get tired of others shit, they should be able to close themselves off from them.

The simple fact that a single administrator can moderate an instance of about 100 active people in their free time is what allows the moderation in fediverse to scale. Adding more people makes it a job, and from what I've read from professional moderators of social networks, that job is not a nice one.

Sure, people have been choosing that approach for the last 10 years. But there's no law baked into the universe that says it will be ever thus.

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