This seems like it could be solved by shifting the federation to the client. Let me choose which servers to subscribe to, and let my client merge comment threads when the same story is posted to multiple servers. And let me choose a mod team to filter stories and comments for me.
If the fediverse is like email, then filtering should happen on the client. It's not like I expect gmail to "defederate" an email server that's used by people I don't like. I expect it to facilitate my emails with anyone else, regardless of which mail server they use. And I want gmail to do some spam filtering for me, but I expect that I can see the filtered messages and show the filter what it missed or wrongly labeled as spam.
If we leave the federation up to the servers, we'll just get a "fragmentverse" of walled gardens instead of a single big one.
The difference is that email is a one-to-one medium, so it's easy to define spam. It's something the recipient doesn't want. Anyone who sends this or willingly serves users who do is unambiguously a malicious actor, so they get blocked.
With forums there are arbitrarily many recipients of any message. A lot of people may not like furries or communists or what have you, but demanding that every other instance ban them as a prerequisite to interoperability is how you kill the network by suppressing everything but the lowest common denominator.
This problem is created by tying accounts to instances. Because then other instances, instead of banning the accounts they don't want from only their own instance, can try to get them banned from everywhere by threatening any instance that allows them with disconnection. Which is poison.
> This problem is created by tying accounts to instances.
That's a huge issue. My identity should not be tied to anyone but me. This has to be one of the biggest things that scares (admittedly more knowledgeable than average) people off early when they're required to pick a server. Mastodon's "don't worry you can move servers later" is better but still not frictionless, and does not work unless your source server is still online.
Here's an even better version: all servers exchange everything, it's all text, properly managed the synchronization is efficient. Clients list topics and get full threaas with the assurance they have everything. Mods decide whether your story/comment respects the rules before allowing the post.
