I really really don't like the idea of a central committee of liberals that will defed any instances that are more radical that "vote blue no matter who!"
I really really don't like the idea of a central committee of extreme right cultists that will defed any instances that are more radical that "vote red no matter who!"
Point being, I think it's a plus to be able to decide for ourselves.
What if instances could "subscribe" to the list of defederated instances of each other?
So for example. Let's say that Alice and Bob have their own instances, alice.ml and bob.ml. Bob trusts Alice, so he sets up the following rule in bob.ml: "if alice.ml defederates an instance, then bob.ml defederates it too."
Then Charlie starts charlie.ml. It's a bad instance. Alice manually defederates alice.ml from charlie.ml. Bob won't need to do anything - bob.ml would do it automatically.
I feel like this idea would address the issue of playing whack-a-mole, since admins of multiple servers can split the busywork if they so desire, and only with whomever they desire. And there's no risk of a central control going rogue, since there's no central control on first place.
It could be even further refined with more complex rules on when to automatically defederate other instances. Such as taking into account if the other instance did it manually or automatically, or how many among X instances defederated it.
From running multiple accounts across multiple instances, I've found that each instance feels like a separate forum of posts. Sure some of the big ones federate with each other, but that still doesn't lead to being able to see the same federated content when you log into infosec.pub or lemmy.world. I think a lot of the differences in content lie with which instances federate with which other instances.
As we've learned here on hexbear with our recent federation, reddit people are almost unimaginably bad at making memes. Suddenly having your feed look like 9gag is a downside till you block a couple comms
1: Anything that's federated is public (to instance admins) and can't be reliably deleted.
For ActivityPub, that's pretty much everything except user account.
For email (SMTP) that's sender, recipient, subject, and usually body.
Etc. Instance admins can log whatever they want. Laws like the GDPR or CCPA don't apply to all instances.
2: User signup is much harder because choice paralysis over which instance to join often sets in. That in turn leads to default recommendations, resulting in centralization in a few instances. E.g. lemmy.world, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ml for lemmy, Gmail, Apple mail, MS Live email, AWS email options for email.
I'll put it this way. In the US, there used to be a rule where, if you broke the law and the police were after you and you drove into another state, the police from the first state you were in had to rely on that state's police to do anything. There was an episode of the Simpsons that spoofed this once. Now apply this to websites.
If you break the rules of an instance and move on to a different instance, then… what's wrong with that?
That they are still centralized in a way. Federation is only the first step, the next step must be real decentralization, so no more server software!
Where I notice the most annoying downside to me most is Mastodon: You cannot see any previous discussions and interactions.
When some makes a post I see zero replies, zero boosts, and zero likes when viewing it from another instance. The user also has zero previous posts and zero people following them. When opening the profile on their instance I see hundreds of previous posts, a couple of thousand follows and the toot in question has some likes, some boosts, and a lot of replies.
You cannot censor content. I could make an instance where I post the most vile things and even if 99.99% of lemmy hated my guts and wanted me shutdown I could continue to host my instance and federate with like minded communities. In a non federated platform Admins would delete my instance.
This is a positive to some and a negative to others.
