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On part of the promise surely works: You can still run your own instance and federate with those instances that want federate with you and build your own social net. However, social networks with free-for-all blocking are often very brutal brutal.
In retrospect, it should have been obvious that decentralization is not sufficient for freedom. Imagine a school cafeteria where you have freedom of association -- but the ruling clique can also say that loser nerds are not welcome to sit in their table.
And we've seen this play out since the dawn of the Internet. The vast majority of online spaces were rich in cliques, flamewars, relentless trolling, and corrupt moderation that never shied from using the banhammer for personal gain. It's why such a high number of online communities follow a predictable path of eventually becoming echo chambers and later imploding. Perhaps it would even be fair to say that the vast majority of people who take on the mission of establishing and running a community have little or no knowledge of basic coordination mechanisms, some dating as far back as ancient Greece.
Themotte and some rat-adjacent spaces are the only ones I know that have avoided imploding while maintaining the ability to generate novel, interesting discussion. I can see no other reason than the fact that these places have not only enshrined rules that encourage civilized argument, what Karl Popper labeled "the rational unity of mankind", but also ensured that moderation is done in the spirit of those rules.
As evidenced by the broader culture war, the majority of people are fine with tribal warfare, whether it's online or offline.
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This is starting to sound to me like folks that try to run their own mail servers. In theory, it's a federated protocol. In practice, newcomers and small fish are very difficult to operate because automated spam filtering pretty universally rejects them, and a mail server blocked by Gmail or Microsoft isn't terribly useful.
There have been some proposed ways to improve email federation, but the big players have a lot of inertia and no real reason to change anything.
It's interesting because spam filtering isn't particularly politicized to my knowledge, but the outcomes are similar.
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