Mastodon 2.5 released

Is there a way to make a mastodon instance for a private community where it requires registration (& approval) like a forum, but still have the federation between instances? (if not, is it possible to unfederate an instance?)

I'm stunned that people still today don't realize that there is no, big and centralized free services. How would that work on the company side? Who pays for giant servers and software development and maintenance? People are not too sharp in 2018.

When you use a corporate social network, you are trusting a bunch of people trying to make enough money to pay Silicon Valley rent (never mind pay back huge piles of VC investment) to do the moderation. They are likely to be more interested in a constantly-rising user count and ever-longer user sessions that give them opportunities to sneak in as many ads around the edges as possible; they are probably only going to kick people off for behavior that can get the company sued.

When you use Mastodon, you are trusting a handful of people who are probably running it as a hobby to do the moderation. Their only goal may be to have a nice, chill place to chat with friends; they can kick people off for whatever kind of behavior they find undesirable, whether that be "repeatedly failing to post pictures of cats on Mandatory Cat Post Day", "talking about feet on No-Feets Friday", or "using the Banned Circular Letter six times" on an instance that demands you never use the letter O.*

And if an admin finds that they are getting a lot of reports of a foreign instance for behavior they forbid, they can defederate from that instance, thus slicing out a large source of undesired behavior in one go. Users can vote on moderation policies with their feet (though perhaps not on No-Feets Friday if that's the issue that's polarizing huge portions of the overall community) and move to another instance - or maintain two accounts if they want to keep a foothold on both sides of the divide.

I could probably spin this into a metaphor for representative democracy if I wanted. Pick an instance whose admin (and her moderation team, if it's big enough to have one) feels likely to agree with you on moderation, report violations, let her do the dirty work and maybe say "thanks" and give her a little something now and then.

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* Of course, you could also kick people off your instance for things like "expressing political views opposed to the instance admin" or "acting like this is 4chan". But comedy examples are more fun, and less likely to make you snap into reflexive defense of whatever your position is.

I resent the "not too sharp" comment, and the implication that I hadn't even considered the idea that you're paying with your data coming from all three of you.

I'll respond here to all of you that responded generally with "you pay with your data, it's not free."

Ok fine, but you don't know what you're paying with on Mastodon, because you have no idea what any one node might do with your data, because there is no centralized privacy policy. Not a problem, I'm sure you read the privacy policy of every website you join right?

I'm also not sure why you assume a free, ad-based Mastodon service wouldn't exist as the network scaled.

The network has like 100k active users. It's very much in 'virtue untested' territory.

> The USA is actually not a federation, and purposefully stopped being one (it turned in a confederation

You have it backwards. The USA was a Confederation (a weak alliance of almost entirely independent nations) under the Articles of Confederation, 1776-1789

Then in 1789 it became a Federation (a strong national union of autonomous but not independent states) with the new Constitution.

In a confederation, the central government has negligible power and states can come and go as they please. The EU is arguably a confederation, and it's pretty much the only modern example, because confederations rarely last long. Historical confederations include the CSA and Holy Roman Empire.

That is not the model that the Fediverse wants to uphold (otherwise it would be called the confediverse). Mastodon is intended to be structured as a Federation, like the United States, Germany, or Malaysia, with a strong but limited central power that maintains unity among the federated members, while mostly letting them do their own thing.