This is not a cultural failing that can be fixed by asking people to be nicer, which was roughly Scott Jenson’s prescription. Nor is it resolved by pointing to the protocol’s openness, which was roughly the community’s response. Neither prescription reaches the actual problem, because Mastodon’s governance tools sit at the instance level and the community’s experience happens at the federation level. Mastodon was built as open infrastructure at the federation level and community at the instance level. The Jenson thread demonstrates that the community has long since reversed this: they experience the federation as their community, and the instance as an administrative detail. The software has not caught up, and until it does, the community will keep enforcing its boundaries the only way the federation layer allows: person by person, reply by reply.

Thoughtful article overall, but I think what is describes is a design problem of Twitter like micro-blogging. There really is only a void to shout into, and I don’t really see how software can catch up to anything there. I also don’t really understand how this problem is specific to the Fediverse/Mastodon, with even the pre-Elon Twitter being famously toxic for very similar reasons.

Lemmy and other “community” based Fediverse software has much less of this problem, because there is a venue i.e a community to post into which has a theme, rules and moderators.