the fediverse seems like it's done a real bad job of eradicating hierarchy. it just made a thousand little ones that are kind of hidden and interact in unpredictable ways
eliminating hierarchy was never it's goal, no matter how many anarchists tried to recruit me to it from 2018-2021 not bothering to realize I already had been there and left due to feudalism.
I'm on it now, with an instance I talk with, and I follow people. But since you can't post to the local timeline without posting to the federated timeline, I still get random people jumping in to badly refute points I've already clarified, one at a time, like henchmen in an Akira Kurosawa samurai movie.
A large collection of leftist devs may have been trying to deploy it to reduce hierarchy, or thought they could through their work, but they all burnt themselves out fighting the rest of it, it seems. Not that it seems like it could even work within the mastodon spec.
We need some form of p2p social networking that has ways of managing spam, reputation, blocks based on those reputation systems, etc -- and it needs to be pseudonymous and changable. I don't know the way forward past that -- there's a lot of attempts but they've all got that newborn deer shaky legs stuff going on and are all like 8 people total working on them. But as long as accounts have to be on servers, instead of accounts hanging out in any servers they choose like they're locations, it won't do it.
If your mastodon account is homed on hachyderm because you're a queer technologist but sometimes want to hang out in the woof.group leatherbar's local feed, you can't with mastodon. That's the biggest indictment of it, to me. In a lot of cases on mastodon, admins and moderators aren't moderating spaces, they're moderating your access to the social graph
