If the majority of the populace is happy with large, badly-moderated instances, more power to them. That doesn't mean the very real people well-served by small instances with enforced moderation policies should have that taken away from them.

We only have problems when large instances get block-happy. There's some weird stuff going on in fedi admin circles, but so far, it hasn't been as harmful as (… think of a non-Facebook example…) Tumblr's centralised moderation decisions. This is mitigated by small instances, where heads are cooler and tensions are lower because you don't have everything to think about all at once, and individual moderation decisions are less impactful.

> It's impractical if not hostile.

On the contrary, decentralization is exactly neutral. It just feels hostile to users who've simply accepted a centralized vendor as the default, and now may need to consider an alternative.

Most decentralization in practice is messy: homeschooling, homesteading, private health insurance, or rolling your own email server. That is because the majority of the population will have a preference for not doing things this way.

Agreed. Sentiments like GP are why I won't take the Fediverse too seriously until support for custom domains is a first class citizen.

> It masks the reality of the situation which is that instance moderators have too much of a say in what individual users get to see or do.

Uh, instance mods don't have more power than admins on other platforms. dang can Thanos snap you from existence on this platform at any moment: how is that for having a say on what you can do?

What you complain about is that you hear a lot more about the moderation on the fediverse than you do on HN or Youtube, despite Youtube moderation practices impacting a lot more people than the sum total of what happens on the fediverse.