I mean, it could work, but having moderation be centralised, with the option to start up communities on the same subject with different modding policies, just makes more sense efficiency-wise.
What would be the benefit of every server modding everything that comes in compared to that? And they CAN still do that, by appointing instance mods.
There's one more benefit.
In a federation, you can join the new less shitty version, AND stay in the old one going downhill.
You can vote for the new thing, without giving up on the old. You simply switch which one you post to.
Imagine if you could have Reddit and Lemmy, in the same app, seamlessly intermingling, but actively reduce how much you contribute to reddit, while actively increasing how much you contribute to lemmy.
You could contribute to that change and improvement, with ZERO trade-offs. How many more people would support the next thing, if they could adopt the new without discarding the old?
Some form of aggregation may still be possible. Be it user by user, or server by server.
But like I said in another comment, for the fediverse to work the way you imagined, the total number of people doing content moderation would have to be orders of magnitude greater than even facebook's or twitter's.
Additionally the way it works is not mutually exclusive with differing ideas, only, in the way it actually works, instances that agree on moderation policy, can pool their efforts. Only where there are differences, are different communities and different moderators, needed.
In a federated system, once up and running, "jumping ship" is much, much easier. Changing entire sites goes from new accounts, apps, and people, to just seeing where the users go, and following.
A community is its users, and in the fediverse, when a site goes bad, the users don't have to go with it.
This would be monstrously inefficient. No, each community is moderated by its top mod, and any additional mods that they appoint.
Worth noting, is that you can mod communities that are on other instances, an account does not need to be on the "home" instance of a community, in order to be a mod on it.
This way, content does not need to be moderated multiple times, for every instance it is on.
Could you imagine subscribing to a community you like, and suddenly being saddled with the responsibility of monitoring everything that comes through just because you accessed it off-instance? Or worse, having to review the entire history of a community because you just added it from a new instance? No, this would never work.
The goal of federation is explicitly NOT decentralised content.
It DOES store content it in a decentralized way.
It DOES allow interaction in a decentralized way.
It DOES NOT decentralize control of the content. It can't. It shouldn't.
The admin of an instance, can control all content on it.
The top mod of a community, can control all content on it, across instances.
You are in control of your own content, across instances.
In a system that is truly peer to peer, truly decentralized, you could not edit. You could not delete. You couldn't even reliably take down content that breaks the law.
The point is not that no-one should be in control of anything. Quite the opposite. The point is that no one entity should be in control of everything.
In this, federation is completely different from other systems.
The old content would not disappear. Federated content is in fact stored on every server, and is not fetched from the "main" server every time someone wants to interact with it. Only changes are transmitted to and fro. Defederation entails the ceasing of this synchronization.
If startrek.website had genuine reasons for shutting your instance out, you probably don't want to stick around on it either.
If it didn't, that will mean people likely wont want to stick around on it.
The third option is something like what happened with beehaw, where an instance was unable to deal with the moderation load of large outside instances. In these cases, the defederation is likely to be temporary.
Either way, the content moves around a little... Establishes new homes on new instances... And you're back to business as usual after a bit of turmoil. A lot less of it than with a commercial centralized services going down though.
For any given community, yes, there must be a center. How else can there be admins and mods doing something as basic as keeping posts in a community on topic?
But we don't need to put all the communities, or users, on one server. Each server can be the hub for different things, or even different parts of the same thing. For example, anime communities for different series are spread out all over the place, but there's still generally only the one, each.
Federation means centralized decentralisation. It aims to strike a balance.
Each community still needs to have an admin, a creator, and moderators. In the future, it will likely become possible for a community to pack up and move between instances, but things still have to have a "source". This is what enables centralised control, moderation, within a decentralised system. The "home" instance is in control of any given community, but it is in fact hosted on ALL servers that it is federated with.
But this isn't peer to peer, each copy is just a copy, only the "real" community gets to be a "legit original", this is how it can delete stuff. This is how you can delete your own stuff. Or edit it, for that matter. Every community has a "center" somewhere on the network, and all others are "spokes" to that "hub". But each server can be both the hubs and spokes for different things, spreading out the load on the system, and providing redundancy. When a server goes offline, the other "spokes" of any communities on it keep working to a limited extent, however, the "spokes" can no longer talk to each other without the "hub" so comments and posts stop syncing.
If any given server goes to shit, yes, there will be loss, but the system as a whole survives. And it wont be long before the communities that were lost set up new "hubs". Additionally, the old spokes don't go anywhere, they will still show up in search, be visible in your user history, available in full as an archive. It just wont be an interactive one.
Without this, you just get peer to peer, along with all it's suitabilities for illegal activity. In a federation, there's still someone in control, who can purge criminal or simply unwelcome users. Or to just keep things on topic, to prevent a star trek community from being flooded with bots posting star wars.
I suspect he just straight up logged out and went off into the sunset...
That's not at all how it works. There aren't going to be 15 different mini forums, one for each instance. Only one instance needs to have one, and the rest can connect to it.
That just doesn't stop people from starting duplicates on other instances, same as on reddit, someone can start another sub for the same thing with a slightly different name.
But this means there needs to be someone monitoring posts, not just every five minutes, but every five minutes, for every server.
This is completely untenable. An off-instance sub might not even have enough subscribers on that other server, to count on both hands. Yet someone has to mod it? For small communities, there might just be one or two subscribers to it per server.
You're giving examples with massive usercounts, which wouldn't work, due to that massive usercount. But low usercount examples also don't work, due to the low usercount.