This week, the Catholic Church wrote one of the better diagnoses of why decentralised social networks keep struggling.
…the collaboration between instances on things like moderation is virtually nonexistent. There is no form of federated diplomacy, or even a mental framework on how servers should interact, besides defederation when you get too annoyed with another server…
… [On the other hand, with BlueSky there is the opposite failure mode:] solidarity without subsidiarity is the benevolent provider of infrastructure: one big network that takes care of everyone and quietly removes their agency."
The Mastodon Covenant is an interesting case. This sets out the minimum standards that instances must meet to be included in joinmastodon.org. I don’t know the process by which it came to be, maybe it was just an edict handed down or maybe there was some community input… The point is it’s an example of something that governs how we are together. Instances can opt in to it, they gain certain benefits and we all gain increased confidence in the fediverse.
Anyway, some process and place where covenants / treaties / accords can be hashed out and instances can indicate that they’ve signed on to them.
There could be standards developed for
and so on