the answer is “they failed”
Can you be a little more specific? Like I said, I wasn’t using it while it “failed”, so I don’t have much experience here.
you still need to have some form of collaborative filtering / moderation.
But the advantage of those sorts of systems is that you can have many more types of moderation and collaborative filtering that aren’t “a single autocrat who owns or rents the hardware has absolute control”. Such as Aether’s democracy; or Scuttlebutt’s “subjective moderation”/public blocking; or maybe a hierarchy where the person at the top (say, the founder) delegates control to moderators to run subforums but he doesn’t have direct control over those subforums, and those moderators can delegate further and so on ad infinitum, like DNS; or a normal political system but with protection against certain abuses of power, such as shadowbanning. Sure, you could try and implement something like those systems in a standard server-focused model, but the single autocrat with the hardware can break the rules any time they like.
Whether the person is my friend or not, all other things being equal, it’s better for him to have less power than more. And even if he is my friend, he might not be other users’.
Technological tricks that increase your power as a user (key based identity, data portability) can work in both kinds of systems.
Yes, but can radically new (for the internet) political systems such as those I described?
The other big negative of that is exactly what you said, that you could have a thousand of the exact same community because every server has to have their own, meaning that a relatively small user base ends up getting split up, and people who might like to talk to each other maybe can't talk to each other.
My view a more correct answer would be to figure out a way to have a fully decentralized community that can be somewhat locally administered. That way everyone has a copy of the same list of posts, but maybe every server maintains its own list of posts and users it doesn't find acceptable, like a curated usenet. Then a smaller group could have more discussion.
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Put that way it's obvious which is better.