Next to inviting citations, it would also be nice for everyone to be able to add citations. Make it more of a collaborative effort than someone’s time line.

Would it need a way to make clear we are really interested in the citation? I feel that most cases people ask for citations, they mean to say diplomatically that the claim is nonsense.

To explain why the fediverse is such a nice place, I like to say that it is made up of communities that have their own rules and keep their own neighbourhood clean. That also explains why we have less problems with moderation than a global monopolistic platform, but that may not be a good opening sentence. The disadvantage is that you then have to additionally explain that you can still talk to (almost) anyone. For explaining how it works technically, the email system is really helpful.

And all governments, including the ones that America bullies, are in on it as well as thousands of scientists. Conspiracies of that scale are impossible to pull off. Just like the moon landing. It is easier to land on the moon.

It walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, maybe it is a duck and this virus emerged like any other virus in the past.

Found it and posted it there. Thanks.

One could create a part of the fediverse like that for people who just want to chat and make friends.

It would be a poor model for a lot of what I am interested in. I am mostly interested in niche information. One Mastodon account of mine is on translating the scientific literature. Many of the people following Translate Science write in languages I do not master; those are the people who would benefit most from translations. It makes no sense to follow them back.

We could also create a part of the fediverse that is even better at spreading niche information. For example, that would have team accounts so that multiple people can contribute/moderate an information feed.

I started understanding what parasocial relationships mean when I explored Twitch. I am not aware of anything on Mastodon that comes close to that. I do not have the feeling that people feel they are friends of the people behind the largest accounts I know of; but everyone has their own feed.

A diversity of strategies is normally best. The great thing of the Fediverse is that that is possible.

Mastodon has it. I feel it is important, even if not many people would use it, it is a useful check on the power of the instance.

Shouldn’t Northern Ireland be included? They are part of the internal market. :-)

I remember an article claiming that Reddit had it relatively easy in dealing with disruptive groups compared to other social media system is that they have a ban evasion rule. So that when a Subreddit was banned and created a new sub they could be banned again before creating problems.

Is the main side-wide problem that these posts turn up in the search results? Otherwise they are only seen by people subscribing the moderated communities people subscribed to?

If yes, an option for (low volume) spammers could be to only exclude them from search results and otherwise have the moderators of the communities and their downvoters deal with them. As you already write many cases are grey areas, so maybe in such cases such more subtle mechanisms are enough.

As only removing from the search results is less disruptive one could moderate more posts this way.

Scientific publishing and preprint servers are already federated. There are many different preprint servers and journals. You can start your own preprint server or your own journal. There are dedicated search engines for open access literature like BASE and CORE. If there is something that works badly on Mastodon or the Fediverse it is discovery, that is partially because it is federated, and partially by design to have a more friendly atmosphere.

The federated publishing system does not have the same power-equalizing and improved curation properties as the federated social media system. To break the power of the publishers we need to bring back the control of the assessment of what good science is into the hands of scientists. Scientists already do all the work, but the publishers control the brands that determine how good an article is.

So my proposal is to created a federated open post-publication peer review system. Most proposals for a “modern” peer review system are based on a central database, I prefer to do the peer review in small communities (like Mastodon instances), which can exchange peer review reports (like Toots) and moderate them. For details have a look at https://grassroots.is

Pubfair uses the ActivityStream protocol, but it connects one repository with one peer reviewing system/journal. So it is not the kind of federation I would think of as Mastodon user.

Replace them with cat emojis?