[iforgotpassword]

IRC and forums have nothing to do with federation. Maybe IRC if you look at the channel level, but there's still network-wide rules you need to follow or get banned, just like forums have one or more admins with a final say. The fediverse is just random scattered kingdoms having fragile connections.

There have been so many attempts at it for the past 20 years or so, but people just don't want to accept that it cannot ever work. This is not the 90s where most people online were academics and you could get away with everyone building their own Killfile over time.

[p-e-w]

> The fediverse is just random scattered kingdoms having fragile connections.

Indeed. And each "kingdom" has the exact same problem with power centralization that the Fediverse supposedly solves. And the more popular an instance becomes, the bigger this problem gets. And the more popular an instance becomes, the more people will join it. And boom, we're back to zero.

[fzeroracer]

Neither of you seem to get it. You're talking about 'power centralization' in a completely different and orthogonal way from how the federation works, which makes me think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of centralization or federation.

If you're banned from a popular instance you're not banned from the platform as a whole. Because there is no single authority dictating where you can and cannot post, unlike Reddit. It's similar to being specifically banned from a subreddit.

Reddit is a kingdom whose king delegates power to various fiefdoms, but ultimately still controls the land. You are at their whims, as evident by the fact that they're removing mods that disagree with their API policy. Federated instances are multiple kingdoms that share borders which they keep open for the sake of trade. But those borders can close depending on how their neighbors interact.

It's like I said, a return to forums or IRC style governing except the authority is the forum or channel itself, and they can link to other forums/channels as they want in a seamless fashion. In order for systems like these to work communities need a way to defederate and control who they connect to, because inevitably bad instances will rise whose sole purpose is spam, harassment etc.

[p-e-w]

> If you're banned from a popular instance you're not banned from the platform as a whole.

The most popular instances are the platform. Yes, you can run your own instance, with only yourself as a user. Unless others choose to federate with you, that's the equivalent of calling your blog a social network. And if the biggest instances impose their own rules on others under threat of severing federation, the freedom to run your instance as you wish exists only in theory.

[lost_tourist]

Whenever you get a bunch of people together you have to have rules or you get the inevitable mentally ill person who starts to troll or try to spread racism. Think 8chan or 4chan on steroids. It just has to be done. Hopefully the rules are permissive enough to allow reasoned debate on topics between diverse opinions. However I don't need to know your political leanings in all caps while discussing the latest news so pitch that guy off. If I'm being rude or ranting pitch me off.