Good points all around.

To some extent, that kind of automated moderation is inevitable on a service or site that has millions of users. You just can't scale a site that large without throwing out some baby with some bathwater, especially if the service is free.

But the same moderation tools were never necessary on services with small communities of users. From BBS's in the 80s/90s to message boards, small groups don't need to rely on automated filtering. That's part of the appeal of joining a small instance on the fediverse: it's like a club, where standards of behavior don't need aggressive enforcement.

What's unknown to me, however, is how the fediverse can handle spam and bots and abuse from outside communities. That's not something that BBS's or message boards had to deal with as much.

In a pinch, communities could also deal with the problem by just shutting down federation and being entirely "locals only." For communities who are often targeted for abuse, that might be the smartest thing to do, unfortunately.

Either way, I like the format of it so far. Cross-posting to lemmy.ml, for example, I feel like a "guest" in this group, if that makes sense.