[strypey]

I agree there is a middle ground between policing everything and no guidelines or accountability at all. Every decentralized social networks that's pulled in a user base beyond the friends of the devs has had to deal with how to find consensus around guidelines, and how to deal with Bad Actors. Fortunately, in free code tech, everything we do revolves about rough consensus and running code.

So within a project like Mastodon, they define goals; eg a spam-free network). Then, they theorize mechanisms to implement those goals; eg give users the ability to mute/ block spammers, and give instances the ability to boot spammers, and mute/ block instances infested with spammers. Then they code those features, roll them out, and see if they achieve the goal. Rinse, repeat. Pretty much the same process a centralized open source site like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Minds, or Yours would use.

Things get a bit more complex when Mastodon wants to federate with instances of software other than Mastodon (eg GNU Social). Fortunately in tech, we have other names for consensus and guidelines about inter-operation between different programs implementing similar features; protocols and standards. For example, the W3C Social Web EG got a bunch of folks together from projects that want to federate, and standardized a set of protocols under the name ActivityPub. Because this standard is written by people with experience dealing with Bad Actors in federated networks of their own software, they can share this knowledge, and follow a similar set of steps to those laid out above.

In contrast, FB at al are the worst of both worlds. They have total power to police anything, and the only way to hold them accountable is to abandon your data and your contacts on their platform and opt-out (thus #deletefacebook). They accrue more power and wealth the more users they have spending time on the site (abusively or otherwise), so they do the absolute minimum to hold Bad Actor users accountable, just enough to other users getting driven off the site. See how centralization doesn't really help here?