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Comment by fsflover | Hacker News Reader

Actually, it is possible to join Bluesky without relying on the single point of failure, as Cory Doctorow highlighted here: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/05/executive-dysfunction/

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The single point of failure is always the biggest instances or communities, which impose their rules on everyone else under threat of refusing to communicate with them.

This has happened with every single federated platform, and it can’t be solved with technology because it’s fundamentally not a technology problem. People want to be where other people are, so once the community reaches a critical mass it inevitably degrades into the same sump of mediocrities and their rules as everything else.

I think you will find that a lot of people find that to be a feature of the federated networks. It's how society works outside of social networks. You aren't likely to see football fans of different teams sharing pubs here in Europe. You wouldn't see judgemental people be allowed in accepting roleplaying communities and so on. Why would a network of community controlled servers be any different than this? IRC was like this, Discord is like this. When you give people control they are going to kick out the opinions and people they don't want around.

If you find yourself on the outside, it might just be that you're the village idiot. Before SoMe platforms like twitter, facebook and other places without local moderation the village idiot didn't have much of a voice either.

Email and Usenet are both decentralized systems that in theory aren't affected by instance admin bitchfights anywhere near to the level of drama in the fediverse. Yes: many providers didn't mirror the binary groups due to piracy, and in email, deliverability is a constant issue thanks to spammers.

But the fediverse? Can't count how many times I've seen instance admins hold their users hostage in bitchfights over the Israel/Palestine stance of other instance admins.

Usenet was(is?) moderated similar, to IRC, Discord and so on with some newsgroups needing moderator approval for every single post. Also, there was a lot of drama on Usenet. I don't think it's that different from the fediverse. I guess you could debate whether moving your "personality" from one fediverse server to another when is worse than having to use a new email to access groups that banned you. With the fediverse you can certainly be punished for the actions of other people on your instance much easier compared to other platforms.

Email is probably the closest to anarchy. If you could get people to use it for group communications, every user could decide who they include in their "reply all", which would probably lead to absolute chaos.

The village idiot analogy is misguided and unnecessarily accusatory.

However, I do feel internet communities were better when they were smaller due to being special interest driven and self-policing. People wore different hats according to the community they were engaging with.

You're right, landsbytosse doesn't not translate well. To be fair the literal translation is village fool, which isn't much better. It's meaning would be more along the lines of village eccentric, which could be the village idiot, but not always.

There was a very steep curve to access the Internet back then (both economically and technically), and that was a very big filter (although it let through many smart assholes anyway).

> People want to be where other people are

not neceessarily true, see Matrix where it pretty much doesn't matter where you are

> This has happened with every single federated platform

It didn't happen with the internet itself. You still can avoid Facebook and co. and happily discuss things on HN.

And with the email, it is much less serious than people assume. I do not use gmail or MS and practically nobody I talk to does.

actually, you did not respond to what parent said. How is the standardization process related to joining the network?

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