@Elucidating The users aren't running the routing. I don't run mastodon.social. The people who do run it can run a filter as well. The separation would be formal and functional, not organizational.

I don't think users should be required to buy into both to use one. That seems to go against all principles of FOSS.

@MoonMan Okay, it's pretty funny I'm talking to "MoonMan" about this subject.

I don't disagree that community clusters can form. In fact, I assume that they will, and that's precisely why I think content discrimination should be separated out from instance administration. An instance administrator can run a blacklist/filter as well, but formal separation of function will make it so that instance users are not subject to the whims of the instance admin.

@Elucidating You aren't arguing against my point that it should be modular and separable from federation itself.

It doesn't seem controversial to say that content discrimination shouldn't be determined at the routing level.

@Elucidating Agreed. But already we are seeing clustering based not on bad actors but on ideology. I'm in favor of pushing content discrimination as high up in the stack as possible, not putting it at the level of IP blacklisting.

I'm not advocating an absolutist position, but right now I think balkanization is a more pressing problem than spam, precisely because authority to cut off bad actors is already relatively centralized.

I'm uncomfortable with hub-runners deciding which other instances they do and do not federate with. People can certainly run filtering services, but they should be independent of instances/hubs, not tied to them.

For similar reasons, I don't think hubs/instances should be thought of as communities with individual cultures, because you then turn the hub-runner into the de facto community leader.

Running a SMTP/NNTP/OSocial server shouldn't make you a doyenne. People get high off of that power.

So the question: how to make hubs that are/have

* reliable
* trustworthy
* non-exploitative of users
* non-authoritarian (wrt censorship)
* proxy-able
* graceful failover
* graceful obsolescence
* potentially anonymous
* potentially transient

I think in the absence of these considerations, mastodon networks will, as others like @bcrypt have pointed out, tend to consolidate around a few large instances that will have too much trust & reliability burden placed on them.