Wrote a post in the online craziness thread that was topical to the Fediverse -
https://leftypol.org/leftypol/res/941093.html#q1546940 We're getting opportunities when big social media corps do massively offputting things, but I'm concerned that a lot a lot of Fediverse platforms are not only failing to take advantage, but are shooting themselves in the foot. To a much smaller degree its some actual development or technical issues in a project - Lemmy had both usability/feature and privacy/security issues that, when revealed by the new influx of users after the Reddit debacle a month back, was seemingly met with hostility or derision (Kbin, a similar project's devs reacted a lot better last I saw) etc. However, the bigger issue comes down to admins of individual servers behaving not just badly to the point it disrupts the benefits of an open, federated, interoperable protocol or platform itself.
Its bad enough if admins refuse to use several tiers of moderation tools up to and including essentially preventing a user/server from having any public presence on their node while still allowing their users to make their own decisions about what users and servers to whom they'll connect, but instead uses the maximal block that prohibits any contact between users on their server and those on the node in question (frankly, I don't see any technical reason for this option to exist when others solve the problem but that's another discussion), treating one's users like children. Its even worse when this is done not in reply to any actual event the vast majority of the time, but rather because of tenuous claims of finding someone or something objectionable allowed and therefore marked as "bad'; many of these are laughably poorly justified if it wasn't for the fact it affects hundreds or thousands of users on both sides when one admin takes offense. Blocklists with the hardly substantiated "proof" and the list of their sins show up and admins on the same ideological side are encouraged to wall off all the problematic locations, disrupting the interoperability benefit of federation. Even worse is the childish extrapolation where one can be blocked for simply NOT blocking servers someone considers 'bad", which sounds a lot like schoolchildren (or regrettably, enough adults it seems) that because X and Y broke up, you can't be friends with X anymore and if you refuse, then all of Y's friends will also disown you too.
The Fediverse has a lot of promise, but this kind of stuff is simply shooting yourself in the foot, turning an open and interoperable network into walled gardens and bubbled fiefdoms. The point of running your own server in a libre federated protocol is to set rules for what happens in "your house" , while recognizing that your users get the best experience when they're able to "go elsewhere" where rules may be different, all utilizing the same accounts and protocols. Its enough of an uphill battle against all the money and vested interest in corporate centralized social media not to mention the inertia and network effect of their established platforms. Users from Twitter who are used to being able to interact with any other user who they havent' personally blocked or vice versa aren't going to be happy to learn that their choice of instance comes with baggage of ideological friends and enemies and whole groups of users they'll never see on that account (and no, the "oh you have to maintain multiple accounts in each one of these petty kingdoms" is not going to be acceptable to the vast majority of people nor should it be); Reddit users won't be satisfied on Lemmy with posts that have different and different amounts of comments viewed from different instances, or being blocked from Sub-Reddit equivalents because you're a member of another sub and/or instance, among other issues. Yes, a tiny minority of users or those with a particular ideological rationale to put up with this will remain, but a lot of others - the ones that we need on federated alternatives to have a chance in hell of highly-used alternatives to centralized, proprietary, exploitative social media (either existing or the next to rise), - will just leave. This is to say nothing for how the decentralized and federated nature of the Fediverse platforms is rightfully extolled as beneficial and a reason to switch, only for the behavior of enough admins to undermine the whole enterprise both ideologically and practically.
While this is not exclusively a Leftist problem (there are tons of right-leaning instances that put up the same walls, act i nthe same childish manner etc..but their it bothers me when a significant contingent of the usual suspects fall somewhere on our side, which leads to among other problems, proliferation and validation of stereotypes as well as just general negativity from those who arrive on a particular instance or set of instances and have a poor experience with someone throwing around Lefty sounding rhetoric as the justification for their bad behavior. These are all problems, both technically and ideologically that we don't need and get in the way of a lot of potential good. I've been thinking of some small ways to start remedying this facilitate moving in the right direction, but I guess we'll see how things progress.