>Today, discussions of how federated social media will affect content moderation focus on people who want to say things that big social media companies won’t let them say. What that discussion omits is that federated social media will also allow you to *block* things that big social media companies *permit*… > >…the point here is to reduce the power and centrality of big platforms, which means that you can’t cook up a conspiracy in some fever swamp of your own and then game the algorithms of Big Tech platforms to put it front and center of millions of other people. > >The internet doesn’t make more people vulnerable to bad ideas, but it lets ideas of all kinds – bad and good – spread widely. It’s as though we’ve all moved from the countryside, where we all got water from our own wells, into a city, where we all drink from a central reservoir. It was always possible that the drinking water for one family or small community would get a bad microbe in it and sicken the people who drink from it, but that sickness didn’t keep spreading, because of the distance that isolated on group from the next. (pg. 154)