It sounds like nostr. Why don't you just use that?

That said, it's not realistic to have everything be public. But whatever, I'm not going to argue this any more.

I think you're totally misunderstanding how decentralization works. It sounds like you think it should be a free for all and everyone should be free to access everything. But again, the fediverse is about choice. It's totally okay for an admin to be able to cut off another instance. It's their instance, that's up to them. Nobody wants absolute free speech.

If you don't like that, go to another instance that doesn't do that and if you get cut off from another instance by another admin, maybe consider joining that instance or another instance that isn't defederated.

And consider also that this power is great motivation for everyone to stay nice and well moderated. If you are mean or spammy or whatever, you get defederated. So you better be nice! That's a great feature if you ask me.

No! That's exactly what you can't do, because if you tried you'd get banned by the admin! In your scenario, there are no admins to stop such a bad actor. But ultimately admins control what communities are on their instance, so you can't just hijack all communities like that.

Reddit does have an instance, in that sense. There's just only one. Reddit has admins too. They can even ban entire communities and you can't go to another instance to make the community again.

Also again if there are no instances I'm really at a loss for where these communities are hosted and who is legally responsible, for instance, to remove illegal content.

Well other admins should be entirely in their right to cut you off. Same as anyone should be able to block you. If another admin decides to cut you off, that's up to them, you can't stop that and shouldn't be able to. That is anyone's freedom.

But usually it is not a problem, as long as you are reasonable. Why would another admin block you if you are reasonable?

They really have as little power as they can given the constraints. If you don't want an admin to have power over a lot of people, join a small instance and advocate others do the same.

It really sounds like you just want to be your own admin though. Maybe a personal instance would be a way for you.

Again, then choose an admin or an instance that doesn't get defederated a lot. And as said elsewhere, you (or at least most people) don't want a scenario where you can't block other people or whole instances. Defederation is an important moderation tool.

You realize the way things work currently doesn’t prevent that, right?

It totally does prevent it because every community has a unique name, when you include the instance domain. Which is the whole point. The instance is where the community lives.

Indeed - that is why you should consider at least a little bit which admin you want to sign up with (i.e. which instance you choose). Choose an admin that wouldn't just do that willy-nilly (except maybe in cases where abuse/bad actors is obvious), but would only do it after careful consideration and maybe even with involvement from their users.

This is not an argument against the fediverse model of admins owning instances. It's just an argument for choosing good admins.

there’s a bunch of centralized authorities instead of one

I mean sorry but that's just what decentralization is, unless you want a fully peer-to-peer protocol which is not realistic at all.

I suppose communities would not have unique names then - otherwise I'll just go ahead and create communities from all the words in the dictionary and then I control all communities.

So if they don't have unique names, how in the world do we refer to them? By some opaque UUID or something? I mean I guess it's possible, maybe.

Who's hosting this new community you just made? Where does it live? The description of the community, you know the side bar in a Lemmy community, where is that physically speaking?

only mods should be able to ban me from specific communities

As I stated elsewhere, I don't really see how you can even have mods without admins.

But how is admins banning you from an instance any different than a mod banning you from a community? Why are you okay being banned from a community by a mod but not okay being banned by an admin from an instance? Isn't it the same conceptually speaking, just on a different moderation/administration level?