> the "policing" problem (I think moderation is a better word)
I don't, because this also involves deciding who can have an account on your server, once you are federating then you also have to decide who you federate with and any possible defederations, what data to store etc.
> The question is what is the most democratic and economically viable way to do that.
It doesn't even have to be democratic; once it's federated with enough nodes in the network, freedom of movement of accounts between servers and a possibility of defederation between nodes, the democracy is somehow implicitly there. I'd say economical (or resource including admin and moderator) viability is the only important thing. People have to stay motivated; individuals will always come and go, it's just important there are enough people willing to work on infrastructure, motivated by money or otherwise.
> What the open source fediverse really needs at this point is a sustainable source of funding to reach more mass-market usability.
One think to consider is that it also needs sustained funding of operations, not only of development, as opposed to capital- and ad-funded commercial social networks. I'm doing my bit by sending a small amount of money to a mastodon server each month.
I agree, there are countless issues and challenges (and ideas, designs etc. how to tackle them). The most fundamental is for mainstream, non-technical people to realize that "social media" is not rocket science invented by Zuck, its infrastructure. Every bit as vital (actually more) as the roads and parks and water utilities of a city.
There will be some happy surprises required to overcome the inertia of network effects but enshittification is now terminal, so it actually looks promising :-)
I don't, because this also involves deciding who can have an account on your server, once you are federating then you also have to decide who you federate with and any possible defederations, what data to store etc.
> The question is what is the most democratic and economically viable way to do that.
It doesn't even have to be democratic; once it's federated with enough nodes in the network, freedom of movement of accounts between servers and a possibility of defederation between nodes, the democracy is somehow implicitly there. I'd say economical (or resource including admin and moderator) viability is the only important thing. People have to stay motivated; individuals will always come and go, it's just important there are enough people willing to work on infrastructure, motivated by money or otherwise.
> What the open source fediverse really needs at this point is a sustainable source of funding to reach more mass-market usability.
One think to consider is that it also needs sustained funding of operations, not only of development, as opposed to capital- and ad-funded commercial social networks. I'm doing my bit by sending a small amount of money to a mastodon server each month.