alt Hacker NewsIf your concern is being mysteriously cut off from communities by capricious and inscrutable moderators then all the Fediverse offers is an opportunity to experience that over and over indefinitely. I've never encountered a community less interested in accountable moderation.
Is it still true that pretty much anyone can post your handle with #fediblock and get you and your entire instance sent to the cornfield automatically by hundreds of servers? This destroyed my city's mastodon instance and drove everyone I knew there to bluesky.
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There are basically three options that someone designing a social platform has to choose from:
1. Some designated entity decides who gets hidden from everyone's feed. (Google is here)
2. Everyone decides on their own, who they want to hide from their own feeds.
2a. The same but they can also form voluntary groups that share ignore-lists between each other. (Fediverse is here)
3. You can't hide spammers from your feed.
1 is vulnerable to the entity being corrupt (they always turn corrupt) - let's say 5% of global ignore list entries are there for corrupt reasons.
2a has the exact same problem but it's separately per ignore list group, perhaps each individual ignore list has 5% corrupt entries on average, which conversely means that every person is on about 5% of the ignore lists for corrupt reasons. Instead of 5% of the people being on 100% of the lists, now 100% of people are on 5% of the lists (except the spammers who are on 95%) which may give an impression the system is more corrupt than option 1.
The other options, 2 and 3, mean you're constantly bombarded by spam so you give up and quit the platform entirely.
This problem is unsolvable.
The Fediverse has multiple hosts. And the option to host your own should you choose to do so.
I've been on the Fediverse for nearly a decade. I've jumped instances a few times. I'm currently with an instance run by a friend I've known online for well over a decade, who does have a strict moderation approach, but is also reachable out-of-band and is quite responsive and principled.
On Reddit, Google, FB, etc., you've got a single provider, and if they freeze you out you are fully frozen out.