>The solution can't just be "there are more people moderating," which translates to: the network is much more expensive to run. But that abstraction is the solu

>The solution can't just be "there are more people moderating," which translates to: the network is much more expensive to run. But that abstraction is the solution to everything in a federated system: spread out power so it isn't corruptible. Have you thought about the possibility that this is exactly what at least some people actually want? Reddit is a great example of a platform that has moderators basically working in a federated way and has been a huge commercial success. By having that commercial success users are now subject to negative market forces that erode the character of the platform because at the end it's not actually federated but the owners simply didn't mess much with it for a while. Mastodon has taken a huge step towards making sure that these market forces can't invade and dominate the platform because Mastodon devs don't actually have the same control that the owners of Reddit do. In other words I don't see why we need to judge Mastodon's success based on it's size but based on it's viability as a platform which is already pretty decent. And each Mastodon instance is free to solve it's own funding issues so I don't see how the fact that there is no central advertising and the "cost" of moderation is higher affects it. So the usual success rating of how many users you have does not apply directly on Mastodon. >I can respect that Mastodon is philosophically consistent: if you want to really control your communications, you need to put in the effort. I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities. If they did we wouldn't have FB, IG and Twitter already. There is a fairly large number of people who put considerable hours moderating fb groups for no profit. The same goes for reddit moderators. Every one of them could potentially launch or help moderate a Mastodon instance( especially a topic-specific one). So the number of people caring required is much smaller than you might think. Besides if your point is that people don't want this control, let's remove blocks/mutes and see the chaos unfold.