[Dracophoenix]

> So eventually nodes that collect jerks will just get cut from most of the rest of the federation.

Why do you assume the "jerks" wouldn't decide to federate among themselves. What's stopping them from creating a Splinternet (Splinterdon?) where they're free to say what they want?

> So the platform isn't going to give an outsized "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.

You can't get rid of recommendations. Someone can easily build an easy to use page-ranked search engine for Mastodon servers, even if unofficial, and the engagement race will reinvent itself.

[cmrdporcupine]

Nothing would stop them. That's already happened -- that's effectively what Truth Social is, for example.

And it wouldn't matter. Because the majority would be elsewhere. Or not. The point is that there's no centralized authority making this decision. And if I didn't like how the node I was on handled the moderation, and who it chose to federate with, I'd be free to move my account elsewhere.

I personally would just choose to hang out on whatever Mastodon node that had cut itself off the the Musk/Trump-ish node.