> One of the points that Aurynn Shaw makes is that federation hampers the addition of protocol features because new features have to be agreed upon by all participants in the federated network. This adds friction to the evolution of protocols, and results in the phenomenon wherein Slack runs halfway around the world while IRC is still putting on its shoes.

This is true in the case of a fragmented specification, however there is a neat middle-ground that has been observed recently in the case of the Matrix specification, in which a single team has been setting the spec that many clients implement much quicker than would occur in the environment of IRC. The spec's movement will eventually become much more solid than its current liquid-ish state, but by that point it, the specification itself, the set of implementations, and the collective network effect will be quite valuable.

> ... each node sets their own policy, which meant there was no single point of responsibility for onboarding new users, setting standards of behavior, or filtering out trolling and harassment. . . .no authoritative source for new users to determine who/what should be filtered. . . . behavior, but if someone is harassing you in PRIVMSG there's often nothing you can do -- and channel bans can be circumvented and enforcement bots subverted fairly easily. . . .

This is not an issue, as long as the user is told the ramifications of federation, that curation of what they can see is done either by themselves or by the particular server they use. Not to mention that it is just as difficult to subvert bans on a network like Matrix, or a registered-user-only chan on IRC, as it is on the likes of Discord.

> So federated networks quickly become cesspools of the worst forms of communication because they're optimized to promote all forms of communication -- "freedom of speech at all costs" as [. . .] This tends to make them grognard-friendly, but hostile to new users and to users of marginalized communities, as well as potentially illegal to participate in in countries not called the USA.

If some speech is illegal to in your country and you also do not think it is moral, you should not speak it. Otherwise, why do we need some central authority to micromanage us and determine what types of speech are to be blacklisted? Even pretending that such a thing could be accomplished in a scalable way, and pretending that the codification of 'illegal numbers' is a good idea, why is it necessary to introduce such a vulnerability into communication software? The admins of a server may curate as they wish and users may choose which communities they wish to engage in by virtue of their choice of server and subscriptions to preferred data.

> Today we understand better the social costs that mentality has unleashed. We optimize for creating safe, welcoming communities and promoting voices that are usually silenced, rather than allowing everyone to communicate anything at any time.

If anything, I wager it is the opposite. The current model in which the position of censor is centrally held is far more prone to abuse than its predecessor, considering the impossibility of that authority to reconcile with the unlimited number of complaints various groups will have with its decisions. Things are far more toxic and unwelcoming today under this model than they have ever been before, with more innocent voices silenced than ever were before, precisely because the typical user no longer controls their subjective flow of information. People should have the capacity to curate for themselves, to control the machine and not be controlled by it and the whims of vendors, to control both what they wish to say and what they wish to hear. If that were still the case today, we would never have gotten ourselves into this mess.