Centralisation of communications media is an extremely powerful force.
The typical remediation for centralization is regulated public utilities is breaking up a monopoly into a cartel of 3-5 local monopolies.
Also not great.
We are participating here at a very rare occurrence of decentralisation.
For everyone who thinks this is important for our lives and for the world, it is incumbent on all of us to build structures now that hold this ground as the federation grows.
#cosocialca
The typical remediation for centralization is regulated public utilities is breaking up a monopoly into a cartel of 3-5 local monopolies.
Also not great.
We are participating here at a very rare occurrence of decentralisation.
For everyone who thinks this is important for our lives and for the world, it is incumbent on all of us to build structures now that hold this ground as the federation grows.
#cosocialca
Evan Prodromou
•It details the initial decentralization, followed by centralization and monopoly, of various media from telegrams to film, radio, tv, telephones, cable TV, and the Internet.
It's a fascinating read, and well worth your time.
Matt :idic: 🌌
•I unfortunately read pretty seldom now, being addicted to multi-media and constant stimulus. I can hardly just watch a video anymore, gotta do two things at once.
Tim Wu on the Master Switch
YouTubeEvan Prodromou reshared this.
Evan Prodromou
•That is, thinking the architecture of the technology will preserve the topology of the network.
Mastodon is Open Source. It's built with open standards.
This is necessary but not sufficient to keep the network decentralized.
We're going to need social and legal structures, plus cultural norms, that counterbalance Metcalfe's law, which pushes the network towards centralization.
ks
•Is not Mastodon heading is this direction?
Evan Prodromou
•Bob Wyman
•Evan Prodromou
•Second is setting up financial structures that make those feasible long-term without bankrupting the admins.
Individual operators with high hosting bills and legal liability are juicy targets for anyone wanting to roll up instances.
Evan Prodromou
•For example, company instances, family instances, local city or neighborhood instances, nonprofit or professional membership instances, all emphasize equivalence of a domain with a group.
We know from email and Web that this cultural norm can help a lot to maintain decentralization.
It's not sufficient in and of itself, but nothing is.
Evan Prodromou
•What social or cultural practices might help to keep the federation decentralized?
Bob Wyman
•e.g. I'd like to design decisions that explicitly support Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Rights :
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
See: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
Universal Declaration of Human Rights | United Nations
United NationsBob Wyman
•We've known about this problem since at least the late 1970's when I first started building email systems... Is it too late to fix it now?
Jonathan-FL 🇺🇸 🌊🇺🇦🇵🇸⚛️
•1) That would encourage people with a particular worldview only talking to each other.
2) Most of us have multiple interests/advocacies. I believe that only general-purpose instances that moderate SOLELY based on written rules can provide the environment we need. Holding a minority opinion should never be cause for suspension.
Mark Allerton
•Evan Prodromou
•Evan Prodromou
•mekka okereke :verified:
•I do agree that centralization is coming to the fediverse, but not for any of the reasons that most people on here think. That centralization is coming for the exact same reasons that centralization came to email, and it's a reason that many folks that would like things to stay decentralised keep ignoring.
And that is user safety.
A lot of Mastodon fans keep pretending that Mastodon is inclusive. It's not. But it could be.
mekka okereke :verified:
•As a Black person, simply signing up for a Mastodon account can expose you to vile racist slurs and threats of violence. Most Mastodon users are one popular toot away from discovering that their instance mods are either unwilling or completely unprepared to deal with this.
Because a centralized whitelist was abused in a cynical attack years ago, the fediverse kinda gave up on that idea, and has been very resistant to it ever since.
mekka okereke :verified:
•It's entirely possible for decentralized instances to provide safety, but most don't/won't. I'm super happy with hachyderm.io for example. ♥️👍🏿
But a larger company is going to integrate with the fediverse, and fulfill the most basic user feature request: "As a user of your product, I would like to know that signing up will not expose me to death threats from nazis" 🤷🏿♂️
Then more new users are going to flow there.
mekka okereke :verified:
•The best thing to do to "counter" this coming centralization is super easy to do, but from my short time observing here, it won't happen:
1. There should be stricter criteria for an instance being listed on "join Mastodon." Insufficient moderation gets you de-listed. Handle cynical false reports.
2. It should be easier for a new admin to just check a box and opt-in to a whitelisted federation that excludes the worst instances.
Evan Prodromou
•I also dislike a shared allowlist. It shuts down growth at a time when we need to be reaching more people than ever.
There are 12000 Mastodon sites up, according to some estimates. There are 150 sites on the Rapidblock list. I think a blocklist makes more sense here.
blaine
•(But also agree that a universal allowlist would be complicated, but maybe worthwhile? Long term, allowing small instances, like "we've seen exactly one user here? Fine." but having alerting for new instances with large numbers of users seems an important shared infrastructure.)
Reido
•PJ Coffey
•#mastodon #JointMastodon #Moderation #moderationIsWork #MastodonGrowth #MastodonFailureModes #Hive #SocialMedia
MxFraud
•We dont need more list (white, black, grey, allow, disalow, etc.)
We need tools that do the systemic stuff agaisnt an adversarial network, which in real life is called gossip.
Admin need to be able to set trust level local agaisnt instances, with limited interaction as a default.
We need to share the moderation data with other instances we trust, not share a list
Bruce Heerssen
•Amelia Bellamy-Royds
•Worth mentioning that "allow" vs "block" aren't the only two options. There are "limited" settings, where users from an instance can follow & be followed but don't show up in more public content.
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/
So it is possible to imagine a set-up with an allow-list of known well-moderated sites, a block-list of known bad actors, & limited setting for new/unknown instances (maybe with new limited settings that work better for cautious discovery of new servers).
Moderation actions
docs.joinmastodon.orgCaliban64
•This isn’t funded by venture money or ads. So if you expect a commercial level of moderation, then support the cause monetarily.
Evan Prodromou
•It's an organized campaign by racist, homophobic, transphobic trolls.
Here's a good thread by @tomcoates . Warning: there's some really graphic content in there.
https://twitter.com/tomcoates/status/1595848852942114816
Can you really imagine saying to someone who'd just been abused at that level, "Hey, you're not allowed to talk about this until you pay $1 to the absentee instance operator who let it happen?"
Come on.
Evan Prodromou
•And I'm a cis, white, straight, affluent man. Nothing that was said to me was a credible threat to my physical safety. And it still shook me up pretty badly. I can't imagine how it must feel to someone more directly targeted.
Evan Prodromou
•I got the news about setting up Rapidblock, which has kept the incidents at bay for the last 24 hours. But it's not easy to use. It's not even scriptable; you have to manually update the blocklist.
https://rapidblock.org/
The RapidBlock Project — Home
The RapidBlock ProjectRoxanne 🏳️⚧️ 🏳️🌈🔞
•Meanwhile certain folks, usually white folks catering to an escapist following, coo about how cozy and safe it feels here. This is a real disconnect...props to Evan for being on it though. Thank you.
Caliban64
•Bob Kopp
•gae (and) panic
•Content warning: transphobia, actual nazis, birdsite
@tomcoates's thread is really good. It's also important to note that the world Tom describes is _already_ Twitter and other major platforms for most trans folks. I have maybe (maybe?) once made a report about transphobic content or abuse on a major social platform that was actioned. The standard for "abuse" as written would have allowed 85% of ACTUAL HITLER's euphemisms through. Moreover, too much power is at the discretion of individual moderators, many of whom likely fall prey to the common public sentiment that trans rights are an unsettled debate rather than an issue of basic identity.
Author J. R. Damon
•Evan Prodromou
•Author J. R. Damon
•Content warning: discrimination
The post was claiming that men that drink soy milk are going through hormone therapy... as if that makes sense!
Lien Rag
•You're the first to give me enough information to understand what is actually happening (I hadn't stumbled upon @tomcoates 's thread and nobody else that I did read was giving any practical information).
But sugarcoating the truth (that moderation is done by people and that the solution is not to push well-meaning admins to burn out by blaming them for the work they haven't done - nor claimed they would do in an infallible manner) doesn't help.
mekka okereke :verified:
•Personally I care a lot more about user safety than decentralization. I care about decentralization as it pertains to user safety, product innovation, and inclusion. Which is why for the day job, I choose jobs where I can make sure that small companies compete and win against the big company I'm at. This creates a healthier world, and works better for everyone.
But I don't value decentralization for decentralization's sake.
Gabriel Bauman
•I'm not calling you down for that. Many users want the same. But you should probably acknowledge that not everyone wants the same thing.
Top down moderation is not sustainable if we don't want to end up with Twitter again. We can and should make it easier for users to choose their view of the Fediverse.
Evan Prodromou
•You should take a look at some of the actual stuff people are talking about.
Here's a good thread:
https://twitter.com/tomcoates/status/1595848852942114816
I don't think we're talking about matters of taste. This is egregious intentional harassment , designed to terrorize, that's outside the bounds for everyone and illegal in many countries.
If you don't want to use a shared blocklist, don't. Your choice. Let's make it easier for people who don't want to be brigaded by trolls to have a fighting chance.
Gabriel Bauman
•Blocklists are just one type of policy users should have access to. Bad actors will just keep popping up. Whack-a-mole isn't sustainable. We need a standard way to allow end users to subscribe to policies that aren't just "bad guy lists."
"Don't show posts from accounts with fewer than X followers, or that only reply and never post, or that my friends have blocked, or that company X's blocklist blocks..."
Pluggable moderation smarts.
mekka okereke :verified:
•There's increasing evidence that good moderation just doesn't scale well. Having a mod to user ratio of under 1 to 1000 seems ideal. There's all the opportunity for decentralized social to be safer than centralized. And we're squandering it.
By funneling marginalized users to big instances like mastodon.cloud and mastodon.social, letting them experience horrible abuse, and then blocking them for not using CW when they ask for help.
david van duzer
•I think the 20% technical answer needs to give Instance Admins a protocol for sharing moderating, filtering, and discovery policies. Of course, the 80% answer needs to be communities (like hachyderm) to support these measures.
I had not heard of the centralized whitelist/allowlist incident with Mastodon. ActivityPub will need its SpamHaus
https://twitter.com/dvanduzer/status/1596184661427904512
david van duzer
•Evan Prodromou
•david van duzer
•it will be quicker to understand when i say "Mastodon instances are slashtags"
one way to keep the crowbar in the window is if, say, @corentin started scraping a @local-links @ instance feed from Instances that agree they want to archive linked content.
there is quite a lot of useful metadata that could be baked into that ActivityPub stream, based on that community's "default" interests.
web search engine
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)mekka okereke :verified:
•Yes, the fediverse is safer for some users than centralized social networks, and I'm truly happy for them. But for other users, it is much less safe.
mekka okereke :verified:
•The analogy that several Black users have said, is "Mastodon is the digital equivalent of fleeing 'regular' racism in the deep South, just to experience 'racism doesn't happen here!' racism in Boston." 🙂🙃
Mastodon has more cultural norms around not talking about racist abuse, than around preventing it from happening. I don't know how to convince y'all that this is bad.
So yeah, this creates an opening for centralizers.
Jeremy Sinclair #ฺNET
•The best description I've given about how Mastodon works is, States Rights as a Service.
Saint Baal-MAŠ
•Evan Prodromou
•The analogy with the fediverse is that we have devolved power from central entities to smaller ones with consequent problems of user safety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights?wprov=sfla1
political powers not expressly made over to the US federal government, and thus reserved for the states
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Saint Baal-MAŠ
•Dana Fried
•Twitter was moving in that direction before it sold out. There were still serious problems but it was the best it had ever been.
Sophie Schmieg
•"Decentralization" by itself is just not a moral value
Bynkii (they/them)
•(De)centralization is an implementation strategy/method. The idea that either carries any inherent moral superiority is so bizarre to me, and as I’m seeing, leads people into some rather serious “Animal Farm” ideology.
Mark Allerton
•Bynkii (they/them)
•Mark Allerton
•Bynkii (they/them)
•Dana Fried
•It's important to identify the likely vectors now and have plans against them rather than taking a purely reactionary posture and constantly being one step behind the bad actors.
Remember: always ask yourself "WW4D" - "what would 4chan do?"
Ben ✌️
•Evan Prodromou
•Siobhán :heart_bitrans:
•It's inconvenient, of course. But the much bigger problem is that most of the longer lists are full of "we block this instance because too many people don't put '''politics''' behind CWs"—which is absolutely not a reason we want propagated to widespread blocking.
Evan Prodromou
•It's a shared blocklist and catches a big number of very bad actors.
The RapidBlock Project — Home
The RapidBlock ProjectSiobhán :heart_bitrans:
•Bert Latamore
•mekka okereke :verified:
•You aren't listening, you're talking.
You're telling me how Mastodon is better, in response to me saying it's worse (but could become better).
You're presuming that I haven't reported racist abuse on just about every major social media platform there is. I have. And I'm telling you Mastodon's response was by far the worst.
Lots of Black folk are telling you this and you're just not listening.
Why is that?
Evan Prodromou
•You're right!
I'm going to pipe down, read more, comment less.
Thanks for the reminder.
David Gerhart
•Thomas
•Evan Prodromou
•If there are 100 people on an instance, and each of them has to block an harasser manually, that's 100 incidents of harm.
If the first harassment incident results in a site-wide block, then 99 of those incidents are prevented. It's still terrible for the first person, but the overall harm is less.
Thomas
•(this definitely doesn't cover doxing)
Phillip Hallam-Baker
•Agree but for different reasons.
Centralization is going to come to Mastodon because someone is going to put up a search engine. And that search engine will become a point of centralization.
Dan Shick
•as @mekkaokereke points out, it’s the user safety issue that’s bleeding by far the worst right now. why? because groups that had some kind of a safe haven on twitter are essentially being forced to migrate away as it becomes a right-wing nightmare. the fediverse has a unique chance to accommodate the needs of those groups.
so now is the time to address user safety, not things that have yet to successfully pose a problem but a thing that is a live, on-fire problem for many, many people joining the fediverse. all hands and all resources on deck IMHO –
i believe @darius had some thoughts about moderation as a service that wouldn’t be out of place here. i hope it’s okay that i link one of his comments here:
https://friend.camp/@darius/109400547664856917
Darius Kazemi (@darius@friend.camp)
Friend CampPhillip Hallam-Baker
•The NAZI little turds are going to be coming to Mastodon to wreck it, just like they did in Gamergate and the Sick Puppies etc. etc.
Dan Shick
•Darius Kazemi
•OpenDNA⚙️
•And also that a collaborative blacklist is wise (slashdot/kuro5hin rules).
But also: membership organizations/co-ops for corporate structure solve many problems, both for finance and labor.
Nemo_bis 🌈
•https://mamot.fr/@nemobis/109299518130284804
See also @vmbrasseur on #SuccessionPlanning.
https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/community_passing_the_batton_foss_leadership/
#FediMeta
Nemo_bis 🌈 (@nemobis@mamot.fr)
La Quadrature du Net - Mastodon - Media Fédérégrin
People were using webmail services despite their horrible problems and shortcomings, but the dream of "The Safe Cloud" is strong, they think it's safer than whatever. Well at least they don't have to care, just use, and maybe feel bad when their account gets banned or deleted.
Simon Lucy
•That would be a village, some villages at least.
I don't think email is a comparative model because it isn't broadcast other than to specific members.
This, whether federated or not, is publishing.
Federations require some formal body and agreement of policy. There's a defacto one, but it comes down to, if you don't like this village, town or city then find a different one. Apart from anything else that doesn't scale.
bengo
•Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom "for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons" - Creative Commons
mike (Creative Commons)wakest ⁂
•related have any of yall read The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity? there is a lot in there that is relevant to this moment in time
Bob Wyman
•Bynkii (they/them)
•Running even a smallish instance takes real time. On the technical side, monitoring performance, patching, defense, tuning, membership management is real work and the work increases as memebership increases, perhaps faster.
Moderation is real work and pas a certain point, the volunteer part-time model falls over.
The financial issues also only increase.
igorette
•Evan Prodromou
•igorette
•Evan Prodromou
•Is there a system like https://opencollective.com/ for German cooperatives to work in before establishing their own legal coop?
Raise and spend money with full transparency.
opencollective.comSebastian Lasse
•It depends what you would name a coop.
E.g. https://iconet-foundation.org is a gUG which is easy and there is the “Stiftung in Gründung”.
iconet Foundation
iconet Foundationigorette
•JRD 道ᜃᜒعلم
•Evan Prodromou
•Kingsley Uyi Idehen
•As you know, decentralization can occur over a progressively proprietary network :)
Denise Howell :denise:
•Evan Prodromou
•One is revising legal burdens on operators, like copyright enforcement or illegal content, so they don't assume that the operator has corporate protection, a big legal team or deep pockets.
Another interim option is providing hosted services to make compliance easier (paging @lucasgonze ).
Lightweight cooperative ownership is also a great way to make "community-run" servers really community run.
Denise Howell :denise:
•Bob Wyman
•On the other hand, Federation implies diversity of control and policy. A decentralized and a federated system might have identical technical structures however, the federated system would be qualitatively different from its decentralized technical twin.
Bob Wyman
•I am concerned that relying on instance level content filtering or blocking by admins shifts control of the scope of visible content from individual readers to intermediaries. But, relying on intermediaries is necessary if individuals have insufficient curation tools.
A system that did more to empower individuals' ability to curate would reduce individuals' need to subordinate themselves to others' value judgments.
Joe Hildebrand
•This hasn't pointed me to a potential solution yet, but I'm thinking about the different ways that emulsifiers work.
Guyamrllg
•Jeff Jarvis
•Pekka Sipilä
•One of the largest(?) contributors to Mastodon is the non-profit entity responsible for starting the whole project. What happens if somebody takes over the entity and changes licenses of major parts of Mastodon to include oppressive terms. An example would be to ban certain topics from communication using the technology.
Changing licenses and oppressive terms are not unheard of in the tech sphere, see case React.
Troutgirl
•Yoshimatsu ✅🇺🇸 🇺🇦
•Donny Winston
•Adam Greenfield
•@spladayum
•I doubt it will be, tho.
txwikinger
•Thanks for pointing this out and ask for people to consider this.
teledyn 𓂀
•We haven't rigorously worked this out yet 😅 but we like the notion.
Miss Koula
•José Luis Fernández
•John Ribbon
•Is it just a nascent phase of centralisation or something different? Will the network pivot towards fine grained federation arrangements or will federation fade away as instances become very large?
Nocta [migrée]
•I know literally one (1) person on the Fediverse that has this kind of knowledge. That is not a lot.
Also what would legal structures do against law that:
- forbid to help sex workers in any way (as it is the case in France, Ireland, and probably many other countries)
- forbid to talk about LGBTI issue because it's straight-up banned or deemed "corrupting for the youth"
- forbid to talk about antifascism because it is "putting the security of the state in danger"
- forces websites to hand over data to the governments
- ...
(and with the reactionary wave everywhere I would expect those rules to tighten)
I'm not sure what kind of legal structures can help with that. That would either lead to lawsuits, requiring a lot of money, censorship, or relying on the decentralised aspect to circumvent censorship an... show more
I know literally one (1) person on the Fediverse that has this kind of knowledge. That is not a lot.
Also what would legal structures do against law that:
- forbid to help sex workers in any way (as it is the case in France, Ireland, and probably many other countries)
- forbid to talk about LGBTI issue because it's straight-up banned or deemed "corrupting for the youth"
- forbid to talk about antifascism because it is "putting the security of the state in danger"
- forces websites to hand over data to the governments
- ...
(and with the reactionary wave everywhere I would expect those rules to tighten)
I'm not sure what kind of legal structures can help with that. That would either lead to lawsuits, requiring a lot of money, censorship, or relying on the decentralised aspect to circumvent censorship and being in a grey area of the law, or even going dark web style (<- but that is more of a technical solution in a way).
idk
Holobrine
•https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
empirical rule that that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of its number of users
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Holobrine
•Evan Prodromou
•stocks crash, melg'puguitaieg
•Calves from cattle herded toward that RCT corral?
The name is probably a clue; where the young calf met, they get ripped apart by a herder imposing capitalism like bodies for dollars.
If you want to worship cows, do it respectfully on the right continent.
Sean Coates
•“The industry learned how to secure the enactment of seemingly innocuous and sensible regulations that nonetheless spelled doom for any rival”
Feels like he's talking about Big Tech right now, but it's about AM radio stakeholders trying to keep FM down, 85 years ago.
Evan Prodromou reshared this.
Nodami
•Kingsley Uyi Idehen
•https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8201080-the-master-switch#this :)
#Books #Society #Internet #Web #Monopoly #Media
The Master Switch
www.goodreads.comEvan Prodromou reshared this.
Ben Adida
•Evan Prodromou
•Ben Adida
•PoeticLicenseDK
•Heidi Li Feldman
•Evan Prodromou
•tanya tussing
•Evan Prodromou
•Evan Prodromou
•Larry Anderson
•Sebastian Lasse
•grin likes this.
Sebastian Lasse
•https://digitalcourage.social/@jensclasen@mastodon.social/109364786876612724
Jens Clasen (@jensclasen@mastodon.social)
Mastodongrin
•What I mean is... don't worry about it. 🙂
Steve Foerster 🌐
•Aaron Williamson 🍄
•Steve Foerster 🌐
•grin
nikol reshared this.
Evan Prodromou
•CassandraZeroCovid
•HankFacepunch
•Evan Prodromou
•herbert
•Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards
IETF Datatrackergrin likes this.
grin reshared this.
Evan Prodromou
•herbert
•Pope Bob the Unsane
•When profit is no longer a thing, monopolies will make the most ecological uses of our resources.
pettter
•Because it seems to me that in the absence of capitalist pressures (or with other overriding pressures than the market and profit), you tend to see quite a lot of decentralisation and expansion of communication media, in particular in terms of federated or decentralised structures.
But what do I know.
Jeff Jarvis
•A L Katz
•John Lusk
•#BlackMastodon #socialMediaSafety #mastodonOnboarding
Amelia Bellamy-Royds
•Which then suggests a semi-automated process to put limits on servers that experience large % growth or negative interactions.
grin
2) They'd lose "public" stream completely.
Peter Kaminski
•https://prodromou.pub/@evan/109377098578718887
I like @mekkaokereke 's note about safety:
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109404380624512650
mekka okereke :verified: (@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)
Hachyderm.ioCitizencat
•#decentralization by its inherent nature is peaceful, depends on #cooperation and allows change to emerge and therefore growth.
#emergent
Phillip Hallam-Baker
•First off, look at how centralized 'Decentralized Finance' is in practice. All the blockchain guff is just decentralization theater.
Secondly, the Web was designed to be decentralized. And it still is in certain ways. But Google and Facebook and some other companies have established massively centralized positions.
Network effects are real and there is always pressure to centralize.
What matters to me is having the exit option. Can I switch from Twitter to Facebook without cost? Can I switch from one Mastodon instance to another without cost?
Now obviously, Mastodon as it is today isn't there yet. But that doesn't mean it can't be fixed.
The whole point of Open Source is that you can adapt and extend it. The Web didn't kill Gopher as a competitor, it absorbed it.
SlightlyCyberpunk
•For example, I have seen arguments that that "the devs" need to build a system that can assign people with one click to a randomly selected "safe" sever in order to make it easier for people to join Mastodon. And first of all...is the idea of choosing a provider really so hard? We do that for internet access, we do that for dentists, we do that for streaming services...but it's too hard to do for social media? Maybe we need to fix some expectations instead. But more importantly...is that really how we want this community organized, just a bunch of random people grouped together on a bunch of fairly generic instances? Personally, I'd rather see communities built around shared interests or identities...so your school or employer or community group or hobby organization shows you how Mastodon works when you join their instance. So do we need somebody to write some code that... show more
For example, I have seen arguments that that "the devs" need to build a system that can assign people with one click to a randomly selected "safe" sever in order to make it easier for people to join Mastodon. And first of all...is the idea of choosing a provider really so hard? We do that for internet access, we do that for dentists, we do that for streaming services...but it's too hard to do for social media? Maybe we need to fix some expectations instead. But more importantly...is that really how we want this community organized, just a bunch of random people grouped together on a bunch of fairly generic instances? Personally, I'd rather see communities built around shared interests or identities...so your school or employer or community group or hobby organization shows you how Mastodon works when you join their instance. So do we need somebody to write some code that rolls a virtual dice, and then argue about who gets to be on the One True List of acceptable servers...or is the solution to pester the groups you are a part of to boot up an instance themselves? Is it a technical problem, or a social one?
And I think the comparison to email is a good one, because this *is* kinda how email is set up. Although that comparison does have some failures too...particularly since your email address isn't generally publicly searchable...but a lot of employers and schools and institutions do run their own email services still (and even with those being increasingly outsourced, there's still internal management of it). It's moderated by the local IT/HR/Admin departments, and it's the safest email account a lot of people have for that reason. Also consider that a lot of us have at least one "throwaway" email account, one we use for things we feel are kinda sketchy and that we expect to be full of scams and spam and other garbage. We have different email addresses with different expectations of each. Gmail isn't the one keeping your inbox safe as much as the companies you give your email address to are. I run my own email server and I have floods of spam messages lasting years that I can trace back to a specific data breach at a specific company. So I think the kind of algorithm-based moderation that are tolerably effective for something like Gmail aren't going to be as effective here, because your mastodon address and identity can't really be private.
So IMO we need more instances with dedicated staff and a diversity of rules and moderation styles so people can find somewhere comfortable for themselves. But that staff probably has to get paid, and donations to the Mastodon Patreon probably aren't gonna cut it, so we need institutions that already have some resources and already have policies to handle these sorts of questions to get behind it.