I’m not talking about interactions between instances, I’m talking about Google and Bing indexing Mastadon. That’s who we should be using for search.

No, you are disappointed that Mastadon doesn’t have the same feature set as Twitter. The fact that you can search off instance at all is impressive. What you are asking for is like saying you should find GM cars in Ford’s search bar. Each instance is its own website. Search engines are designed to do what you want, and as Mastadon grows in popularity, it’s search results will become more prominent.

Say you don’t understand the fediverse without saying you don’t understand the fediverse.

By these standards:

• The web is unsafe by default
• Email is unsafe by default

In all three cases, your safety is determined by the home you choose, and who/what you choose to interact with.

Why are people obsessed with communities having the same domain name as their login? How do you expect these communities to deal with moderation and admin policies?

Here are some ideas for solutions to the real issues:

• Add smart cross posting like on Reddit where interacting with a cross post happens on the community where it was created.
• Develop mesh federation instead of a star topography. There would still only be one community with a unique name, but instances could share changes between each other, not just with the host.
• Provide a true cross instance community search that is integrated in the primary UI. It would need to provide better metrics for like-named communities so that users can make an informed choice.
• Admins need to stop land-grab communities. There needs to be a commitment to moderating, maintaining and growing the community. They could start by purging Reddit general interest knock-offs with fewer than 10 subscribers.
• Add support for instance relative links not only to communities, but comments and posts.

In general, I think user focused instances should be separate from community focused instances, but that’s a different rant

If there is a predictable algorithm, it can and will be gamed by a bot.

The closest I’ve seen for control of voting is Slashdot: each person gets a limited number of mod points (votes) on a semi random basis. Then there is a meta moderation queue where a second group of semi randomly selected people vote on whether a given set of votes were sensible. If too many meta mods disagree with you, you don’t get as many mod points.

The biggest problem with that system is that it amplifies groupthink.