> It’s always at the instance level. They own the machine.

The point is that there shouldn't be any "the" machine for users to get locked into as a chokepoint. If you want to block someone, you block them, or delegate it to someone in a way that you can later change at no switching cost to yourself.

> The difference between federated networks and decentralized networks is that the main control is with node operators vs cryptographic key holders.

Fully decentralized networks have to solve a difficult technical problem: If your device is offline, who is hosting your stuff? How do you make it fast and reliable?

Federation solves that by hosting your stuff on an always-on server somewhere, which you get to choose and should be able to trivially switch at any time without affecting your social graph or account name or who is blocked by anybody in any way. Instead of your stuff being hosted nowhere, each person gets to pick, which can and should be independent of any moderation or other considerations. The benefit, and goal, of federation here should be to make the hosting node a fungible commodity.

You can also federate moderation by, for example, choosing a moderator who publishes a block list that you can subscribe to.

But these two things should not be linked together. Doing so is a mistake. As many things of this nature should be made separate as possible and with the lowest achievable switching costs, to inhibit forces that tend toward market concentration.

Federation works when there are thousands of federated instances that integrate seamlessly with one another, not when there are four that are significantly isolated from one another and you need state-level resources to spin up a fifth.

> The point is that there shouldn't be any "the" machine for users to get locked into as a chokepoint. If you want to block someone, you block them, or delegate it to someone in a way that you can later change at no switching cost to yourself.

Why would you force the provider to support objectionable (for them) content? It makes sense for the instance to be aligned with its users on moderation rules.

> The benefit, and goal, of federation here should be to make the hosting node a fungible commodity.

Communities aren't fungible! And your insistence on having federation completely seamless will result in "what's the point anyway, let's centralize it, more efficient"

>Communities aren't fungible! And your insistence on having federation completely seamless will result in "what's the point anyway, let's centralize it, more efficient"

This is the correct answer though, as much as we don't like it "users" as a whole do not care about privacy or centralization

> The point is that there shouldn't be any "the" machine for users to get locked into as a chokepoint

You’re, again, looking for a decentralized system.

> Federation solves that by hosting your stuff on an always-on server somewhere, which you get to choose and should be able to trivially switch at any time without affecting your social graph or account name or who is blocked by anybody in any way

Yes, the ability to change home servers is missing from mastodon.

But even if they had such a feature, the content you see and likely your ability to change servers would be controlled by your instance owner because they literally own the machine your data lives on and which serves you content.

This is the defining quality of a federated network vs a decentralized one.

> Federation works when there are thousands of federated instances that integrate seamlessly with one another

I don’t think this is a useful definition as it also fits decentralized systems.

Federated networks are networks where independent instances of compatible software are able to exchange information without being owned by a single entity (think email, mastodon, lemmy, etc)