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."
I suppose the author assumes that instances are only federating with another to achieve their shared interest of providing content to their users and that they will defederate when the burden of moderation becomes too great for that amount of content, but if that were true then instances would be federating with a whitelists of instances, rather than blocking only selected ones. Clearly most admins want their instance to federate with all and many others, yet the author asserts there would be no solidarity based on the fact that admins and mods only moderate their own users and spaces. The author also asserts there would be no concept of diplomacy, but when the admins ‘get too annoyed with another server’ they surely would know how to reach out to another or how to discuss things in public, like we’ve seen atleast on the threadiverse many times, rather than jumping to the defed button‽