It's mentioned in the post link, but I suspect in practice distrust is less useful than you'd think as long as fresh identities are free. You can't punish someo

It's mentioned in the post link, but I suspect in practice distrust is less useful than you'd think as long as fresh identities are free. You can't punish someone without any "skin in the game". Centralized systems have an advantage here: they can refuse to issue new accounts or make it cost money to register, which puts some cost on spam. Distributed systems can be spammed and sock-puppeted for free. In practice most central systems don't explicitly charge money for accounts, but instead require verification of something that would make it inconvenient to register large numbers of accounts all at once. For example, if you want a Gmail account, you need to verify your phone number with SMS. Phone numbers cost money to obtain, which means that you can distrust ones used to create spam accounts and the spammers actually lose something. This is also why Fediverse moderation puts so much emphasis on defederating instances rather than banning individual accounts. In the Identica/OStatus era of the Fediverse, defederation was actually very controversial! But here in the Mastodon era, the only way to actually punish bad instance operators (and there are plenty of them) is to defederate their instance. This works because instances are referred to by domain name, and DNS is a centralized[0] system that costs money to register, so you can distrust a domain and actually cost the abuser money. [0] The distribution of domain records is decentralized, and you can delegate subdomains forever, but you have to have a chain of delegation leading back to the root servers. Top level delegations cost lots of money, second-level delegations less so, and subdomain delegations are basically not worth anything and can be distrusted with wildcards on the first private zone in the domain (e.g. ban .evil.co.uk, .evil.net, etc).