I am still surprised people didn’t anticipate stuff like this in the fediverse to be honest. We all have jokes or actual experiences about power tripping mods or admins on reddit, discord, twitch, forums, or any other similar situation when a petty person gets a minuscule amount of power and immediately wants to exercise it as much as possible.

Now imagine a person like that owning the hardware on which your social platform is hosted, having access to all the data on it, and in no small way determining how the software will be developed (or at the very least, configured) for their instance. And this is without even getting into the nightmare of what happens once money is involved.

As long as the fediverse depends on these few people maintaining it, it will always have problems like these - you’re just replacing the corporate overlords with petty nerds (and I use nerds here lovingly since I am one of those) and honestly, I’m not sure which one is worse. Fediverse should have from the start focused on individual responsibility and curation, making it extremely easy for people to host their own small instances that are efficient and safe, instead of everyone just moving to the biggest ones and using them like any other social media (but with less oversight). It’s a recipe for disaster. I dunno if that is even possible, but the current approach is kinda doomed to fail too.

edit: FWIW I think Mastodon does it much better, many tech-savy people host their own accounts and are still part of the larger community. However the discoverability is shit so unless you’re already famous, you depend on local feeds to find new stuff (or them to find you). If we can expand on it, make it easier to transfer your account and reuse it everywhere, make it cheap and easier to host and secure your own instances (even for casual users!), it’d be a better way to move forward IMO.

The whole instances thing is flawed. It’s mostly a copy of the walled garden system of corporate big social, including the capacity to install shitty power hungry leaders and the lack of user-centric freedom and control. Hopefully we get a more hybridised system down the line.