Anticompetitive practices shouldn’t be this mainstream and obvious

That’s a really cool idea!

I thought I had cringe resistance.

Splitting hairs, but I think rather than implementing a partial defederation, I think it would be better to set user rights for a given federation instance. Some federations you might want to allow view only access, access to a certain “tier” of communities, etc. Make the rights customizable so its as granular as needed by the server.

Yes, I did skip right to a “solution”

I came to the currency idea because of problems I foresee in Lemmy, some of them may be alleviated by other methods but I’ll outline below. And I’m new to this fediverse stuff so if I am misinterpreting something I’d appreciate being corrected!

1. Ownership and Community - Servers are owned by their hosts and moderator team. I am a part of a server but have no real connection to the other members. Sharing, finding content, meeting new people is rewarding, but I don’t need to find that in my local community currently. Users will gravitate towards more established servers - essentially coercing centralization of content. I think this problem is maybe unexpected as I’ve seen concern over fracturing (duplication) of content.
2. Moderation - There is no strong incentive for good governance of servers. Servers are free to allow bots to register or allow bad faith actors. They may be blacklisted, but this isn’t sustainable. Eventually I expect we’ll see (if not already) pockets of isolated servers that may be cross federated, but closed off to the open fediverse because it is too easy for poorly moderated servers to affect open servers. If a server wants to be taken seriously, they need to moderate and filter their userbase seriously.
3. Governance - back to #1, Servers are owner by their hosts - if a community disagrees with moderation or actions by the owners, you put up or get out. This guarantees that servers can not operate in perpetuity, and certainly not in a fair way.
4. Retention - There is no incentive to keep a server up. If I get tired of paying for my server, why wouldn’t I just shut it down and register on a unique server?

Sorry I did end up solutioning a bit in those problems but I tried to keep it short.

For what would be an acceptable outcome -

1. Servers should have incentives in place to build their own community, outside the Fediverse
2. Servers should have incentives in place to moderate, filter, and even cull their user base (based on that servers Moderation and Governance policies)
3. Servers should have incentives in place to encourage perpetuity, and easy transfer of ownership

Thanks this link is great!

Thinking long term, it feels like “open” or “blacklisting” methods are not sustainable. Bad-actor servers can come along much faster than servers can coordinate blacklisting. Is there any movement towards “factionalized” communities or whitelist groups? Hoping there’s not a limit on number of whitelisted instances because it could get pretty long in the future.