This gets at my issue with Mastodon (and a lot of federation, honestly) in that a) it’s an online HOA and b) “What if you combined the shallow observations of Twitter with the high-stakes chamber play of a BBS?” is a something LITERALLY NO ONE ASKED FOR.
See also: “don’t fail like Mastodon” (your instance admin gets in a personal beef with your favorite artist’s instance admin and blocks 30,000 bystanders over a Scrabble rivalry gone sour)
At some level everything is going to be an online HOA, as long as there are admins determining who federates with who. The only models that won’t fall into that trap are fully centralized or fully decentralized. The pitfalls of the former are known, and the latter would basically be the dark web.
