I forsee in the future federation boards, like servers that work together to vote on good/bad actors/instances and from those other instances could subscribe to their moderation. Still open moderation, you can still set up an instance that doesn't adhere to group A or group B's mod lists, but for the vast majority of people you could have a good experience.

For example, dunno how many saw but had to remove an anti-LGTBQ post in a LGTBQ community today. I'm sure I'm not the only mod who removed that from their instance today, it'd be great if there was a way other instance admins could share that and "team up" with moderation.

I really really don't like the idea of a central committee of liberals that will defed any instances that are more radical that "vote blue no matter who!"

I see that as a pro and a con. If one narcissist manages to get to a position of authority, they can’t derail the whole network. That also means that people can form their own echo chamber islands of like-minded instances. There could be the main island of random interests and then a separate extremist island of all the instances that got defederated from all the big instances. Not an ideal solution, but it’s still better than a fully centralized Reddit.

What if instances could "subscribe" to the list of defederated instances of each other?

So for example. Let's say that Alice and Bob have their own instances, alice.ml and bob.ml. Bob trusts Alice, so he sets up the following rule in bob.ml: "if alice.ml defederates an instance, then bob.ml defederates it too."

Then Charlie starts charlie.ml. It's a bad instance. Alice manually defederates alice.ml from charlie.ml. Bob won't need to do anything - bob.ml would do it automatically.

I feel like this idea would address the issue of playing whack-a-mole, since admins of multiple servers can split the busywork if they so desire, and only with whomever they desire. And there's no risk of a central control going rogue, since there's no central control on first place.

It could be even further refined with more complex rules on when to automatically defederate other instances. Such as taking into account if the other instance did it manually or automatically, or how many among X instances defederated it.

It's interesting to see the mirror between Fediverse philosophies, and the history of international relations. For every person who believes every physical country should be an autonomous island unto themselves, you'll find someone else who believes every country should be policed by the standards of another country or group of countries.

The fact that we can have this debate on the internet is interesting...but I also find it interesting that the internet was already federated to begin with. And we all see how that turned out. The Fediverse is just an internet within the internet.