I think you hit the nail on the head when you said finding a server with rational administration is not cheap. The competition - for those who can tolerate one-liner Twitter culture - is free.
> finding a server with rational administration is not cheap
Sure it is: choose the server everyone else chose. We know exactly how all this stuff works out because we already hashed it out with email. Everyone will just use the equivalent of Gmail and you'll have to do what they say or they won't deliver your emails/posts.
Nilay Patel was right when he said the essential product of social media is content moderation (or a spam filter, whatever you want to call it). Some service will come along and say "we filter out 100% of the stuff 80% of you don't want" and that'll be that. Services/protocols that don't facilitate that will be replaced by those that do. Maybe it's hard to see now, but we're in the "overthrow our tyrannical overlords" phase of the internet cycle. Next up is "please someone make this safe/usable for mere mortals". Centralization etc. is a red herring.
Your claim that Twitter has rational administration is a very bold one. (Which accidentally strengthens your confirmation of me "hitting the nail on the head".)
I was thinking of Bluesky when I said that, but it was true for Twitter for the use of the word rational I am talking about (keeping personal beefs out of it and at least trying to be impartial). Elon Musk has since made himself, and X, the perfect example of an instance admin on a power trip! That's a good analogy, actually. You might be on a moderation team with sensible feedback policies but the odds are very high of a new user ending up on the property, and following the rules, of a miniature Elon.
I'm curious what Bluesky is going to evolve into, truth be told, especially once it begins to federate. It's privately owned, and as X has demonstrated, there is no admin that will allow technology to get in the way of the power trips they end up having, but Fediverse at least minimizes this damage due to its "defederate-and-move-on" architecture.
Jack Dorsey has a history of letting commercial interests stay in front of his share in the universal human flaw of power tripping, which is not exactly a complement but does imply Bluesky will end up mostly like Twitter did.
Sure it is: choose the server everyone else chose. We know exactly how all this stuff works out because we already hashed it out with email. Everyone will just use the equivalent of Gmail and you'll have to do what they say or they won't deliver your emails/posts.
Nilay Patel was right when he said the essential product of social media is content moderation (or a spam filter, whatever you want to call it). Some service will come along and say "we filter out 100% of the stuff 80% of you don't want" and that'll be that. Services/protocols that don't facilitate that will be replaced by those that do. Maybe it's hard to see now, but we're in the "overthrow our tyrannical overlords" phase of the internet cycle. Next up is "please someone make this safe/usable for mere mortals". Centralization etc. is a red herring.