Yes, many communities have these kinds of fuck ups. In the best case scenarios you have a new community half the size and with its attention split. The newcomers still get split between the schism after it happened. The result is multiple weaker communities.

And it take a really monumental fuck up to even get this low level of user action.

Look at reddit, the admins fucked over absolutely everyone and they've made it clear they're only starting. Look how hard it is to get people to come over.

While on the other hand, if most users go to /c/books and by default they see every /c/books on every federated server, then the problem is sidestepped entirely.

No single mod team can get a stranglehold on a community.

Each user gets to choose, by applying or subscribing to a blacklist/while of users or servers. Or they can raw dog it with the click of a button.

But if most users who go to /c/books end up on the "one big /c/books instance" then every other /c/books community except the biggest one, will be a desert that is not worth your time to post to.

[–] TAG@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Assuming you merge instances, how would moderation work, especially if mods cannot agree on rules or interpretations? What about instance specific rules? Would a post be moderated by whatever instance the OP posted from?

If the mods have to agree on rules, you have the same exact asshole mod problem but now with extra name squatting.

[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Basic way, mods censor their own instance. What is not on their instance does not concern them.

Advanced way, mods actions are published as a filter, enacted on the client. User choose their mods, subscribe to them, their client obtain those mod action list and use them to filter the raw feed.

This way mods can "delete" things on other instances too.

In practice, every user is now a mod. You can include any user as being a moderator for you.

Very advanced way, the user's client, for a piece of content obtains all moderator actions, for each moderator automatically evaluate credibility and reputation score, weight mods action in proportion to that score, take all actions for all mods taking weight into consideration to determine "consensus action" and then apply this action to the piece of content.

There are many many other ways to do this. All of them better than current centralized abuse-prone Web 2.0 garbage