> It is not hard to design mechanisms for accounts to actually "own" their posts and followers and migrate them between instances.

Try talking to someone who is currently or has in the past attempted to do this. It isn't so easy, especially if you're trying to do it right.

> When you "private mention" someone, only you and they can see the post. And they can reply with a "private mention" of their own. But if anyone in that "private" thread accidentally mentions any other Mastodon account by name, that is itself considered a "private mention", and that person is invited into the thread. It is an absolutely insane UI design that makes it extremely easy to share private conversations with exactly the people you don't want reading them.

True. I think Mastodon is working on an improved version. But even there, people should probably use a secure and encrypted messaging service (XMPP + OMEMO or OTR, Signal, Element / Matrix, Session, etc) because as with all other web-based "private messages", it is always possible for the server admin to read your messages directly from the database. But with the above private messenger systems, there's some sort of E2EE preventing the admin from seeing your PM content.

> Content moderation is the hard problem in social media, and it's been said that moderation (ie what content people see) is the product. As far as I can tell, Mastodon was designed in complete ignorance of all the actual challenges of moderation at scale, and focused only on a weird offshoot of the "federated" religion: the real problem is that people want to opt into a moderation regime based on their instance.

I know you're excited about BlueSky's pluggable content moderation. But I've had a BlueSky account on bsky.app for a while and the only moderation choice I've seen is bsky.app itself.

If you're excited about centralized moderation, you may as well go to a centralized Twitter clone. Oh, wait. You did.

Yes, federation is imperfect. Yes, with one piece of server software having many more servers & end-users than any other, improvements that might otherwise have been made and deployed are not because compatibility is necessary. But federation is an intermediate step between centralized socials and fully distributed and peer-to-peer socials. It retains some advantages of both and some disadvantages of both. One can avoid all that by choosing a network that isn't meaningfully decentralized or federated, such as BlueSky. Or one can move closer to the P2P model with Nostr. One can attempt to revive Twister (a P2P thing that was similar to an early Twitter).

> The problem that did manifest is that all of this moderation is entirely opaque to users. If you explicitly follow a particular account, you may not see posts from that account because its instance doesn't like its content, because your instance doesn't like its content, or simply because one of the two instances doesn't like the other. Which is very much a thing.3 But the only way to know what you're not seeing is that...you're not seeing it. Ie if you follow an account, you'd have to find some (outside-Mastodon) way to find out what they're posting and then compare it with what you're seeing in Mastodon.

Yes, well I think the future of the Fediverse is allowlist-only federation. You'll quickly be able to see what servers' posts are visible to your instance. And presumably most or all of the servers on that list will also have your server on their allowlist. And the reason I say this is that as soon as you're popular enough to have multiple opinions and multiple standards of behavior that apply to different servers, you're going to run into server-to-server blocking (e.g., Fediblock).

And also because the Fediverse as a whole hasn't really faced a deluge of spam yet.

But you're going to a network that seems to have a single moderation policy (despite saying it is "pluggable", implying that others exist). It will seem fine to you. Until the day when BlueSky runs out of money and starts doing everything that Twitter did / does. You like their moderation because they seem to get rid of the posts / posters you don't like. If at any time there's a change of control, that moderation may change to become too tight, too loose, too pro-left, too pro-right, too slow to respond.

Let me say it again: Right now, BlueSky is "Twitter without Musk" and little else. And if you remember, Twitter used to be "Twitter without Musk". As they've received capital infusions already, BlueSky is just a phone call from a vulture capitalist away from becoming "Twitter clone with someone like Musk in charge"