> This was the first test of federation's claim that bad actors can be dealt with by instance-banning. They failed the test and without this key innovation performing to spec I no longer have faith that Mastadon is any more than a technically complicated open source Twitter.
It should have been clear to any person applying basic analysis from the very beginning that decentralization enables abusers. The parallels to and example provided by email is simply too strong.
Decentralized moderation, where a group of essentially unconnected moderators work independently on a problem, have no ability to coordinate or shift load. Centralized moderation systems have both of these abilities, as well as often financial incentives to keep working.
The article hits it right on one point: this is a basic structural problem.
What the article misses is that it assumes there are good solutions while remaining decentralized. There's a reason the approach email settled on was, effectively, centralization.