https://fieldnotes.resistant.tech/federation-is-the-worst-of-all-worlds/
In her article "Federation is the Worst of all Worlds", Sarah goes over how instances can selectively censor content between instances (a design flaw which some appear to have turned into a misfeature), and how users don't really have privacy from admins.

The article itself was written in 2018. All of these points are valid in 2024, in fact far more so. It is not really appropriate for me to discuss either of these points without giving her work a nod.

As far as I know, inter-instance censorship was never intended to be some sort of "moderation feature". It was simply a design flaw of how the system was fundamentally designed.

Quite a few content curation ideas have also gone in that direction (and leaning on it more and more beyond breaking point), even though it appears to actually be *harmful* to the fediverse as a whole.

A few people also appear to have a wild misunderstanding that the fediverse ought to be a "holiday resort" where you "escape" from another social network (but otherwise continue to use it for "real serious things"), and never see anything "upsetting" (broadly construed). There are also ten user instances and a couple of random companies who appear to think they run the place, and want to tell people how to moderate in their very particular styles.