[Quothling]

Usenet was(is?) moderated similar, to IRC, Discord and so on with some newsgroups needing moderator approval for every single post. Also, there was a lot of drama on Usenet. I don't think it's that different from the fediverse. I guess you could debate whether moving your "personality" from one fediverse server to another when is worse than having to use a new email to access groups that banned you. With the fediverse you can certainly be punished for the actions of other people on your instance much easier compared to other platforms.

Email is probably the closest to anarchy. If you could get people to use it for group communications, every user could decide who they include in their "reply all", which would probably lead to absolute chaos.