The problem here is not just Google, but huge companies in general that operate at a scale where algorithms are the only viable way to sufficiently keep abuse under control.
Reddit recently shadowbanned me as my account was approaching 20 years old. There was no message about what violation had been committed, and attempts to appeal went unanswered. All posts started getting filtered at some point and all comments throttled.
The Fediverse provides a template for a better way-- smaller connected services with better moderator to user ratios.
If your concern is being mysteriously cut off from communities by capricious and inscrutable moderators then all the Fediverse offers is an opportunity to experience that over and over indefinitely. I've never encountered a community less interested in accountable moderation.
Is it still true that pretty much anyone can post your handle with #fediblock and get you and your entire instance sent to the cornfield automatically by hundreds of servers? This destroyed my city's mastodon instance and drove everyone I knew there to bluesky.
There are basically three options that someone designing a social platform has to choose from:
1. Some designated entity decides who gets hidden from everyone's feed. (Google is here)
2. Everyone decides on their own, who they want to hide from their own feeds.
2a. The same but they can also form voluntary groups that share ignore-lists between each other. (Fediverse is here)
3. You can't hide spammers from your feed.
1 is vulnerable to the entity being corrupt (they always turn corrupt) - let's say 5% of global ignore list entries are there for corrupt reasons.
2a has the exact same problem but it's separately per ignore list group, perhaps each individual ignore list has 5% corrupt entries on average, which conversely means that every person is on about 5% of the ignore lists for corrupt reasons. Instead of 5% of the people being on 100% of the lists, now 100% of people are on 5% of the lists (except the spammers who are on 95%) which may give an impression the system is more corrupt than option 1.
The other options, 2 and 3, mean you're constantly bombarded by spam so you give up and quit the platform entirely.
The Fediverse has multiple hosts. And the option to host your own should you choose to do so.
I've been on the Fediverse for nearly a decade. I've jumped instances a few times. I'm currently with an instance run by a friend I've known online for well over a decade, who does have a strict moderation approach, but is also reachable out-of-band and is quite responsive and principled.
On Reddit, Google, FB, etc., you've got a single provider, and if they freeze you out you are fully frozen out.
That friend is not the only moderator who can impact your account though. Someone else on the instance you're on might do something silly that gets it defederated from a ring of 100+ other instances that share a blocklist. You might have friends on those instances you can't communicate with now. Do all 100 of those servers expose the admin's email? Do they respond? Are you going to go through that work in the first place? Obviously not.
It's weird to have to explain this to someone who's used Fediverse services for nearly a decade.
After a ban, it's no easier or harder to make a new account on a new mastodon instance than it is to make a new account on reddit/google/fb/etc. You're never fully frozen out of anything, that's not the point. The point is that gmail will never stop accepting emails from yahoo addresses regardless of how many badly behaved yahoo users there are.
I usually experience this in the other direction, as toot.cat rather aggressively defederates other servers.
It's sufficiently well administered that I'm not aware of any instances defederating it. Where I'm aware of instances being widely defederated, it's almost always been gross abuse and failure of admins to respond in an appropriate or timely manner. I'd left one such instance on account of just such a failure. (Several others shut down, another not-uncommon occurrence.)
Profile migration still has many failings, but it does make moving to and establishing connections from a new instance pretty painless. Losing your old history is a bit of a drag.
I find that the "what if a cabal of small server operators defeds your server" risks very frequently overblown, although it is good to be aware of it.
As a correction, though - emails get bounced based on opaque reputation rules (domain-related or otherwise) all the time. Email and fedi are very similar in this respect.
The problem here is not just Google, but huge companies in general that operate at a scale where algorithms are the only viable way to sufficiently keep abuse under control.
The companies you speak of are billion- and trillion-dollar companies. Banning people is not the only viable way of doing things.
100 people vastly underestimates both the complexity of the GCP landscape and the relentlessness of the daily fraud onslaught, and you don't know what the false positive rate of humans is vs that of the algorithms.
It would take thousands, at least, with top training and the breathing space to actually engage with customers individually. Mind you Google should still do it in my opinion.
Reddit recently shadowbanned me as my account was approaching 20 years old. There was no message about what violation had been committed, and attempts to appeal went unanswered. All posts started getting filtered at some point and all comments throttled.
The Fediverse provides a template for a better way-- smaller connected services with better moderator to user ratios.