[sxg]

Sure, but as the number of users on the federated service grows, how do we not end up in the same place as email today? Does it not become good moderation policy to auto-block all new and small servers (e.g., self-hosted email servers) if you're a big server (e.g., Gmail)? If that happens, wouldn't all users migrate to the big server (e.g., Gmail) and effectively re-establish centralization and undermine federation?

[post-it]

Email isn't fully centralized, and the centralization seems to have plateaued. Fully hosting your own email server is difficult, but there are hundreds of non-Google/Microsoft/Apple hosts. If the Fediverse centralizes to the extent of email, I still prefer that to the current 100% siloization of all social media.

Email is also old and unextendable, whereas the Fediverse has interoperable stacks built on top of it, opening the door to better moderation and web-of-trust tools that help combat spam and decrease the pressure for centralization.

[jeroenhd]

The inverse happened recently on Lemmy. Beehaw.org, a community focused on good behavior, defederated lemmy.world and another smaller site because those sites caused a lot of unwanted content and moderator intervention. Lemmygrad.ml, a bunch of communist extremists, also gets blocked quite often, not just by principled servers like beehaw.

A lot of people got mad for being blocked, but honestly I can't blame the admins for trying to reduce the amount of moderation necessary. There are thousands of people per moderator on those sites and that combined with open registration is a recipe for toxic bullshit nobody wants to deal with.

Smaller instances don't get blocked, though. I doubt they will be until the low quality shitposters will figure out a way to host a server of their own, but without a central gathering place I think even then the abuse will be easily prevented.

That said, Lemmy used to be set to whitelist-only by default for ages. This has been changed, but if someone wants to federate with just their servers of choice, they can just toggle a setting.

Lemmy also comes with an approval form by default, which is used manually to vet users during signup. Open signup servers disable that field, obviously, but those servers are often also the ones that get blocked.

I can see this evolving to a situation where only closed or manually approved servers get federated by default. Requiring manual reduces the probability that a small team of admins will get overwhelmed by a large influx of users.