[Update] AtomicPoet has deleted the piefed.social communities where he was the sole moderator (!movies@piefed.social being the exception). Content is still available, details in the linked post
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And just because someone doesn’t get along with another person
TIL using a colloquialism is the same thing as not getting along.
You and I disagree on whether it’s just a harmless colloquialism.
I don’t like bro-talk. Because bro-talk feeds bro culture—and bro culture is something I want no part of.
And according to you that disagreement also means we don't get along. Because otherwise you wouldn't be banning people for saying bro, bro.
You would be correct.
So, in absence of disagreements & conflicts (bcs insta ban/defederation), and building your own community, isn't that a bit like that the lines of Trump (well, generally politicians to various degrees) or CEOs do?
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Bcs with that (in those cases being surrounded by "yes-men") reaching other specific goals is easier/faster.
I think I'm starting to understand where & how you are going with this, but perhaps not why. CEOs don't have 'a nice community' as a goal, they have their agenda and timelines/mandates. Their 'communities' are purpose-built ("moderated").
What "use" (~overall benefit?) is a highly selected federated community?
It's a genuine question about endgame, how it would look like.
The Trump comparison actually cuts the other way.
Trump runs a Mastodon fork—Truth Social—that’s cut off from the broader Fediverse. That’s the textbook example of building a walled garden surrounded by yes-men.
What I’m doing is the opposite. I will be federating. The difference is that I’ll only connect with servers that are well-maintained, responsibly moderated, and respectful in how they interact.
The key is, I don’t control those remote servers. I can’t dictate their policies, their culture, or their moderation. I only control mine. That’s the entire point of federation—each admin curates their own space, and people decide which servers they want to call home.
So users already have choice. Anyone who doesn’t like my standards can join another server with open registrations or spin up their own. That’s not authoritarian. That’s freedom of association.
A selective federated community matters because it resists the flattening effect of mass culture. Big, open servers always drift into lowest-common-denominator populism—outrage cycles dominate, noise overwhelms signal, and actual discussion suffocates. Curation is not about surrounding myself with yes-men. It’s about creating an environment where real conversation can thrive without being hijacked by mob dynamics.
The irony is that pretending hierarchical software is flat and universal—that it magically represents “the people”—is closer to the politician/CEO move. That’s the populist trick. At least I’m upfront about the structure and honest about what I’m doing with it.
The endgame isn’t control for its own sake. It’s sustainability—a space I’m willing to take responsibility for, that won’t collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
It's not software that represents the people, it's the people using the software that represent the people.
If you handpick people vs if you run a defederated instance seems about the same approach, just at a different level.
If the granularity of like-mindedness standard gets too narrow you do just end up an increasingly homogenous group.
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That's why I mentioned Trump & you provided the Truth Social mention (it's def not a personal level comparison) and how homogeneous it looks to the average outsider. But that does fit the description, only for such a community 'one can take responsibility', bcs it's 'his', not just the sever, but in a sense what the community is/the people are & what they do (same with CEOs in a company).
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To very much exaggerate: like a cult agreeing on everything except the small things like what to have for dinner.
All the issues you repeated here seem like they are normal for a group of more than one person.
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It's just how humans are built. And how communities naturally evolve, live & change.
You mentioned the 'freedom of association' - do you kinda equate that (association) with allegiance? Like a selected badge one wears?
The problem with your framing is that it treats software as neutral when it isn’t.
Social media software encodes structure into how communities are organized. If the software is hierarchical, the community will be hierarchical. There’s no way around that unless everyone literally operates their own nodes.
And that’s where the real vulnerability lies. If you don’t run your own server, you’re not sovereign. You’re donating your content to someone else’s machine and trusting that their standards, moderation, and moods won’t turn against you. Ideals won’t protect you if the design itself makes you dependent.
If you really care about a sense of ownership, then you should be running your own server. That’s what freedom of association actually means. It isn’t allegiance. Allegiance locks you in. Association multiplies your choices—pick a server that matches your values, or start your own. That’s the entire point of federation.
So let’s not pretend mass platforms or wide-open instances are some higher form of democracy. They aren’t. They’re just populism sitting on top of hierarchy. The lowest common denominator gets to shout “this is the people,” while the actual levers of control stay exactly where they’ve always been—with whoever holds the keys.
On your instance too others are contributing the content, not you as a mod. Humans regardless of hierarchical or anarchical systems are the community. It's the gathering & exchanging. It's not the king paying for a feast that makes the guests mingle & communicate with each other. That's just infrastructure. If they go away to anther party there is no content there, unless the kind posts for themselves.
But are you saying that owning the server makes you own whoever donates their content in a discussion just bcs they have a systemic power?
I don't think people are generally confused at all how hierarchical online platforms are. Why would they be?
The feast metaphor doesn’t hold. If I pay for a banquet hall, the guests can mingle—but they don’t control the locks on the doors, the electricity, or whether the venue even stays open tomorrow. If I decide to shut the place down, the party ends whether they like it or not. That’s not neutral infrastructure. That’s systemic power.
I’m not saying the admin “owns” people’s words. Users own what they write. But whether that writing continues to exist, whether it stays visible, whether it can even be reached—those are all contingent on the admin. Content lives inside infrastructure, and whoever holds the keys controls the environment where it persists.
And people absolutely are confused about this. Look at lemm.ee: did the community want to vanish overnight? No—but the admin pulled the plug, and everything disappeared. The same happens on Reddit when admins close subreddits, or on Discord when a server gets nuked. People routinely find themselves blindsided because they mistake participation for ownership.
That’s the point I’m pressing: software that demands admins and mods creates hierarchy, no matter what ideals we wrap around it. If we want a true commons, the architecture has to change—there can’t be “users,” only peers, each running their own node. Until then, pretending otherwise is just comforting metaphor.
That is systemic power to end it, not to have content created. For that is just a space.
I'm not sure who was arguing against there being a hierarchy to online or most offline social communities.
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You don't have a town square if nobody builds it, you have the woods.
Also what is the big deal if a community gets obliterated from time to time? It's not a family.