That seems likely to result in a split. Not a few isolated servers with jerks, but one big federation with free speech types like Elon Musk, and a different federation with heavy moderation.
But returning to a chronological feed would be nice.
But returning to a chronological feed would be nice.
Like, it wouldn't be "one federation with Musk types" vs "another with heavy moderation" but actually already a whole bunch of nodes with different types of moderation choosing to isolate away the Musk node. Or not. It would be up to each node.
Note that "Gab" and "Truth Social" are both built on Mastodon. But they're isolated from the rest of the federated nodes.
Suppose there are three servers (A, B, C), and A is federated with both, but B isn't federated with C, and there's conversation between people on A and B.
Do people on C only see the A side of the conversation?
I'm a Mastodon newb and not an expert, I'm sure someone else more informed could give a better explanation of the subtleties.
Server A also sends messages coming from servers it federates with, so those on server C can see server B's messages, but C'ers just can't reply to them and expect B'ers to actually receive those messages.
Wouldn't A also forward those replies to B?
It is, IMO a good indicator that neither actually care about free speech, since they are basically "censoring" the rest of the fediverse.
Whether you think this is a good thing is up to you, but it does seem that both groups of people on either side of the Great Divide get what they want from the system, so I don't really see the harm in it.