@LWFlouisa@wandering.shop @cwebber let me reframe this question; can I have a social media platform where anybody can see say anything, and filter out posts and comments from people who add little value to discussions? Yes, I think so. The solution is not in preventing the low quality posts, but in giving users better tools for choosing which users and posts they want to receive, and filtering out the rest
@LWFlouisa@wandering.shop @cwebber seems to me that so far #Mastodon has done a better job of this than #Diaspora, perhaps because Mastodon only came into existence after the alt-right started to get kicked off Twitter and migrate to #GNUSocial (and then to #postActiv and #Pleroma), so they had to deal with them from day 1, whereas the frothing-at-the-mouth crowd only discovered D* fairly recently (maybe due to #NaturalNews going there).
@strypey @LWFlouisa I don't think ActivityPub necessarily does a better job than OStatus except in that you can control better who your message goes to (that and the Block activity). Sadly that's not being taken advantage of by most major AP implementations ATM.
But yeah, I agree with the general thing you're discussing, about having opt-in networks be a way to improve communication
@LWFlouisa@wandering.shop @cwebber also, I suspect that the #ActivityPub protocols, the standard that is (or will be) replacing #OStatus and already has on #Mastodon, have built in better cross-network filtering tools than have the #Diaspora protocols, possibly for the same reason. I suspect if Diaspora doesn't do the work to support multiple protocols, so their users can connect directly with users on the AP #fediverse, they will become irrelevant.