I still don't really understand how federating works, and don't know if mastodon will ever get big, but I have mixed feelings about what if it did.
I see your logic.
But I also feel like a big problem of the current big centralised platforms is that they massively lean into "a giant mosh pit of everyone on the service all watching a small number of celebrities" which isn't that great for users, and means that any kind of moderation needs to "cope" with people interacting with "basically everyone, unless you almost completely opt out". If most ways of interacting are "people you've specifically friended" and "randoms on the same smallish/moderated instance", I think the problem's much smaller. Still potentially big, in that even "friend-of-friend only or backchannel only friend requests" can be a vector for misinformation and abuse, but possibly susceptible to "choosing an instance which tries to cope, or is big enough to have a paid team".
But I guess, I should understand how it DOES work first...
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I see your logic.
But I also feel like a big problem of the current big centralised platforms is that they massively lean into "a giant mosh pit of everyone on the service all watching a small number of celebrities" which isn't that great for users, and means that any kind of moderation needs to "cope" with people interacting with "basically everyone, unless you almost completely opt out". If most ways of interacting are "people you've specifically friended" and "randoms on the same smallish/moderated instance", I think the problem's much smaller. Still potentially big, in that even "friend-of-friend only or backchannel only friend requests" can be a vector for misinformation and abuse, but possibly susceptible to "choosing an instance which tries to cope, or is big enough to have a paid team".
But I guess, I should understand how it DOES work first...