>Strong user safety features are at odds with a federated protocol.
The whole philosophy behind Mastodon is the idea that literally the opposite is true. Servers that are aligned in their safety feature preferences are able to federate with each other and de-federate with servers that don't share those safety features.
For all of the dissing of Mastodon, one thing even its critics begrudgingly admit is that it has better and more granular controls for privacy and controls that mitigate harassment. Normally when people say Mastodon is bad for this or that reason, they say that these controls are unnecessary or too complicated, but I don't think anyone seriously doubts that they are there. And those controls depend in a fundamental way upon federation. If there's one thing to understand about Mastodon it's that it leverages federation to improve strong user safety features.
I like Mastodon, but "too complicated" is a legitimate concern and maybe undersells it. It's hard to use and puts a lot of burden on the users. Also seems like it's hard on admins, who have to deal with bad actors on their own server as well as constantly re-evaluate the volume of bad actors on servers they federate with.
As a user I don't want to deal with too much abuse but I also don't want to have to worry about my server not being able to connect to my friend's server. These goals seem like they're at odds. I could see it working if most users coalesce around a single server or a small network of servers with similar rules.
The whole philosophy behind Mastodon is the idea that literally the opposite is true. Servers that are aligned in their safety feature preferences are able to federate with each other and de-federate with servers that don't share those safety features.
For all of the dissing of Mastodon, one thing even its critics begrudgingly admit is that it has better and more granular controls for privacy and controls that mitigate harassment. Normally when people say Mastodon is bad for this or that reason, they say that these controls are unnecessary or too complicated, but I don't think anyone seriously doubts that they are there. And those controls depend in a fundamental way upon federation. If there's one thing to understand about Mastodon it's that it leverages federation to improve strong user safety features.