Federated social networks give you the ability to change allegiance or fork. Don't like a particular moderator on an instance? Leave to another instance, or start your own. Things can get problematic if other instances refuse to federate your own, but if you maintain even a bit of social capital, most instances will not block an instance with a single user. There's a growing culture (and a set of actions in the ecosystem) of letting people know when you've changed instances, because instances are becoming easier and easier to run and more and more people are trying to run their own. But if you don't want to deal with it, join one of the large already existing instances.

But the problem with Reddit doesn't seem to be that subreddits don't have enough independence and ability to make their own choices?

Federation makes a lot of moderation decisions easier. If an instance chooses to stop federating with another instance, it's not like the entire other instance disappears and those users now do not have a place to discuss their ideas, all that happens is that their ideas cannot spread into the Federated network they were cut off from. Likewise if an individual is banned from one Fediverse, then they can join one more hospitable to their beliefs. Probably the worst case scenario would be if an instance were to go down (or get hacked), in which case the users would have to find another instance to go to, but they could probably sign up at another instance that they were previously federated with.

That's a good point. But this sounds a lot like user blocking tools?

At one time, making sure that users could block other users on the same social network might have seemed like it might enough to prevent abuse and keep social networks out of the moderation business. Users that don't get along can just block each other. Good enough?

Maybe not. You say you know the "worst case" but that might not be imaginative enough? There are apparently people nastier than that, and they're creative, and they gang up.

I suspect that if federation really got going, there would be plenty of abuse. Not sure what form it would take. Chain mail? Phishing? Something new? Who is going to be in a position to fix it? How much drama will this cause?

Phishing combined with botnet attacks across multiple instances could probably pose a big problem for the network, but here's where the second facet comes in to play: instance operators are not incentivized to grow their userbase at all costs. Performing actions that might please their core userbase but may make it harder for new users to sign up, or other hurdles are something that instance operators won't shy away from, when Reddit (as evidenced in TFA) would probably tread more lightly in fear of angering users.

Even in the above botnet+phishing situation, nothing is stopping instances from cutting federation off completely and then banning suspected users, a move that a growth-oriented network would think many times before instituting.

Cutting your users off from communicating with their friends seems kind of drastic? Suppose that happened with email, the original federated network?

Though there are email blacklists for known spammers, and it can be hard to administer a new email server. You wouldn't want to block Gmail, though.

Speaking of which, I'm not seeing why every instance operator would decide not to grow. It seems like, if the federated protocol is successful and allows it, new large providers would spring up like Gmail and Hotmail.

> Cutting your users off from communicating with their friends seems kind of drastic? Suppose that happened with email, the original federated network?

> Though there are email blacklists for known spammers, and it can be hard to administer a new email server. You wouldn't want to block Gmail, though.

Most people typically find an instance with people similar to them. Most of my followers/followees are on the same instance as me. While blacklisting an instance can be problematic, it's also probably not that big of a deal for most. Moderators are more willing to take actions like this when each user does not contribute to their bottom line.

> Speaking of which, I'm not seeing why every instance operator would decide not to grow. It seems like, if the federated protocol is successful and allows it, new large providers would spring up like Gmail and Hotmail.

Hotmail and Gmail came about because running your own email is difficult (I used to run my own email). You have to setup SPF records, DKIM records, on top of which many mailers send non-standard mail out, which you have to make sure your rules accept these non-standard pieces of mail. Right now the ActivityPub standard is well defined, and most instances already follow the server-to-server API. Spam is also a huge problem in the email world because of the ease of sending an email. You don't need a mailserver to send mail to an address, but you need to setup an instance and have other users specifically follow you to send spam toots, or Fediverse messages. On top of this is a community interest in creating software (like Pleroma) that is easy to install and administer. All of these combined decrease the friction for lay (for multiple definitions of lay) users to run their own instance, which makes the gulf between a (not-yet-existent) commercial instance and a personal instance a lot smaller. While there will be a space for commercial providers which use ads or subscriptions to pay for their instances, the ease of personal setup makes centralization a lot less of a tendency for the Fediverse than it did for email.

> That's a good point. But this sounds a lot like user blocking tools?

Except that it's not at a per-user level, but at a per-instance level. Sorta like groups.

Instance A could decide that they don't like the moderation policies of instance B, and then not federate with them. This means all users on B are blocked from all users on A.

Rather than individual users having to play whack-a-mole, they can come together.

But that's not good enough per the article. The guy advocates for active moderation, for surveilling users and making sure they are "good" enough. I guess the interviewee would argue that federation is bad because you can't ban people and control the "toxicity" that way.

Switter was back online with a new CDN within a day because it's run from and (previous CDN aside) hosted in places where sex work isn't seen as a crime. They grew to tens of thousands quickly because they could tap into the existing federation, so they didn't need a marketing budget or sales team like Twitter.

People can make their own thing under their own geography-bound laws while still connecting with a global network. That's really neat.