The general way I’ve been putting things around federation is that it’s a different kind of friction from corporate big social, and there’s an adjustment period needed for both admins and users.

We’ve kinda gotten used to all living under one big umbrella corporation and tolerating their untouchable shadowy actions, as well as the convenience and relative simplicity that brings.

Federation is more chaos but also more human and flexible. So we get more interpersonal friction and less convenience, but more choice and direct connectivity to the admins. Arguably more accountability or transparency from admins too, but I think that’s the part that needs the most growth largely because many don’t know what that really looks like.

The transition can be tough sometimes. A loss of convenience can make us entitled and drama can be a real turn off. But I think it’s useful to think about how much our tolerance goes down when we can put an identity to an action we don’t like. It’s also useful to think about whether the friction of federation is more like real human interactions and whether that’s healthy.

I’m not a decentralisation fanboy. I tend to be critical of it actually, but I think there are trade offs both ways.

the “problematic” part are the users that join that instance because it’s big but don’t expect them to be like that, because then they have to drop that account and create another in a different instance.

Not even that, it also affects users on other big instances that happen to be defederated by beehaw and with beehaw still hosting some of the biggest tech and gaming communities, users won't have access to that depending on which other instance they joined.

My masto admin still is free to ban people he doesn't like from his server of course, he just would rather we be able to curate our own feeds, and I'm sure curates his own just the same as we do. He didn't abdicate the throne I suppose by the nature of being the server owner, and our server is private (exclusive to those in a particular club,) I guess he's just a benevolent dictator. Still though, I like his approach.