@mmasnick @austinc To be clear, as someone who has been selfhosting fedi stuff for ~4 years now, most moderation challenges are fairly easy to decide on.

A big part of that is because moderation decisions are a lot more granular than you usually get access to with a centralized service. ie. if some instance is mucking up the federated timeline but isn’t generally being a jerk about it, you can usually silence their instance (which means you still can follow and interact, their posts just don’t get show up on the federated timeline). The federated timeline itself is generally speaking somewhat conservatively populated so you rarely run into problems with it.

There’s also the fact that the scope of moderation is pretty limited, which avoids a lot of the usual problems of the impossibility theorem - I know what I enjoy, and if someone else doesn’t enjoy my decisions they’re free to leave and that statement doesn’t outright disconnect them from the rest of the fediverse. This even works if they’re banned, you can always make an export of your following list and import it to somewhere else. Given that there’s some instances that literally allow everything, as nasty as it gets within the bounds of US free speech laws, there’s truly room for everyone on the fediverse, just not a requirement to share the same room with everyone else.