It will still probably end up like email. There will be a working group, public or private, that defines minimum spam requirements. If you don't comply, you'll be defederated.

I agree with everything you said.

I'm thinking/hoping that this new wave of Europeans going to European instances will help spread out the centralization of .world and .ml, now and it'll hold into the future, but we'll see.

Hearing that several people have started country specific instances also gives me hope in this. With country/geographicly specific, topic specific, and just general instances, I think/hope it will lead to a more balanced user base.

…. Acquire/rent hardware, or pay for cloud services?

“How does one cook without a stove”

You're not required to run your own instance on your own hardware; you've just got to find an existing instance with an admin team you're comfortable with, create your community there and recruit moderators just like you would on Reddit.

You appear to have asked a vague question and people responded on what they thought you meant with your question.

You seem to be interpreting that as people trying to take your money rather than seeing that what you are looking to understand and what people are answering do not line up.

Another user has already given you other information that looks like what you were looking for, so I won't bother reiterating.

I just want to say that I hope in the future you'll try not to assume people interacting with you are trying to take advantage of you and there may just be a disconnect in the conversation.

Regardless, best of luck with everything :)

You rent hardware.

You didn't need to stand up a whole instance to create a community.

I'm kind of sidestepping the point, but I think the average user will always be able to depend on the community to some degree, at least hopefully. All it takes is one savvy and willing user to support a huge section of community, bless the admins. If I'm being pedantic, most admins don't own the hardware anyway, but that's not the point. It's not even the software necessarily. If it isn't Lemmy itself, the spirit of independent web won't go away. People will be always running Tor, I2P, fedi, I'll even include crypto. The community isn't the platform, it's us.

I apologize for the uncalled-for Ted Talk.

I need to know a bit more what you are specifically asking to answer appropriately, but I'll guess in the mean time.

I'm assuming you asking about starting an instance without hardware. My understanding is that many of the top Lemmy instances are hosted on server farms (companies) rather than self-hosted on their own hardware. Hosting with a company would be essentially renting their server to run your software (Lemmy). You would have control of all the software decisions (instance admin), but would not own the hardware.

I'm not particularly knowledgeable in the area, but the above is my understanding and hopefully that answers your question. If not, let me know and I'll try again :)

Also, I believe the !buyeuropean@feddit.uk community just posted in the last couple days a list of European companies that could be used to host Lemmy instances.

Edit: added correct community and link.

I would suggest starting the invite process with the people who were in the community before it went awry. You can also make a post about how you're starting a new community in the old community and explain what will be different in the new community. I belive this happened recently with the "196" community becoming the "oneninetysix" community when the mods made decisions the users didn’t like.

Being mod of the new community would allow for removal of unwanted users. Additionally, if you were admin of the instance, you could block other instances that had users that tended to not match your stance on issues.

Hopefully, that helps.

I actually just found this on knowyourmeme:

We're living it right now. It is my understanding that Truth Social is basically a fork of Mastodon.

Because at the end of the day, they're all on Reddit. So when reddit says "you'll get banned for upvoting content that promotes violence [against the oligarchs]," you can't just make another subreddit because they'll shut that one down too.

If the admin of lemmy.world says "you'll get banned for upvoting content that promotes violence [against the oligarchs]," then you can say okay and make luigimangione@otherlemmyinstance.com. People on Lemmy.world can still access the new site, or even leave Lemmy.world entirely if they decide they're not down with the admin. But they can still access all of the other federated communities they were subscribed to rather than having to quit Lemmy overall.

Lemmy is built around forums, which is very distinct from microblogging when it comes to moderation and management.

You don't get the same kind of context collapse as on Twitter. You don't get the same kind of dependency on server wide shared culture like on many niche Mastodon servers. Although context collapse still happens to some degree on reddit and may happen here when threads gets popular, it's possible for forums to be moderated to minimize it and enforce quality. You don't get nearly as many people trying to enforce their rules in others' spaces, because forum makes it clear that it's not "your feed" (like how some try to control what they see not with filters but instead by harassing people who post stuff they don't like), here it's somebody's forum and somebody else is the moderator. You can stop seeing specific content by blocking those forums instead of blocking the users. Forums which you don't interact with doesn't affect you!

Because of how the federation works here, volume alone is never the main problem. Forums can be hosted on small instances just fine. Users on small instances can use big forums just fine. If a particular forum is poorly moderated it can be blocked regardless of where it's hosted. Admins for small servers can filter content from problematic servers, regardless how big they are, and can do it on a per-forum basis too in order to avoid collateral.

Spurious defederation between servers where one has a lot of users is where the problems gets complicated.

If it starts being evil, the same thing that happened to Digg and is hopefully happening to Reddit should happen, but way faster because it's a one or two-click process.

(Unless you need to switch your home instance, which AT protocol can accommodate but unfortunately not ActivityPub or Lemmy specifically as of yet)

Yeah democracy is so leftist

...they can be "linked"

What do you mean with that?

...is it blockchain based? or is there a central server somewhere orchestrating it all ?

It does not use blockchain or a central server, but instead uses the ActivityPub protocol, just like Mastodon. That's why Mastodon users can see some Lemmy posts and the other way around.

I agree, but the server owner imposing unpopular rules is not one of the two problems the OP asks about. Those are:

• The first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.
• If/when Lemmy starts to experience its own “eternal September”, what protections are in place to ensure we will not be overwhelmed and exploited?

Decentralization with federated servers does not address those problems.

The assumption that crappy behavior is somehow localized to a specific instance is bizarre, nothing is keeping people from spamming accounts on instances with free signups.

I disagree. If that is your primary concern, look at what Beehaw (another Lemmy instance) did. They closed their signups to prevent the bad actor spam accounts on their own instances, and they defederate from instance that allow the easy signups.

Its extreme, yes. It limits conversation from the wider fediverse, yes. However it does mitigate the exact problem you're citing. I personally prefer to deal with the spammers for the wider audience, but I don't fault Beehaw for their actions and choices.

Decentralization provides a lot of important benefits, such as protection against worsening the whole system for profit, or imposing unpopular network-wide rules. I like it here; it's fun in the way the old web was and the corporate web isn't.

I think we're in agreement that preventing moderators of popular communities from being assholes and handling large-scale abuse as OP asked about are not among those benefits.

That does not appear to be the problem OP was asking about.