If you consider each instance as the “person” it’s essentially libertarianism.
No, each instance is more like a country with it’s own laws, and trade agreements with other countries to share or block content.
Nah, the Fediverse is based on freedom of association while most people live in countries they were born in and leaving one is really hard in most cases. Not to mention that ‘self-hosting’ a state just for yourself would be considered an extremism by existing states.
The Fediverse is clearly a libertarian idea.
In real life you’re probably not traversing three or more countries in a single day. You’re much closer to small communities at this scale, and having all these differences at that level is terrible for community building. Reddit was complicated enough with subreddit specific rules for regular people. Now you may not be able to find the same content as your friend if they signed up for a different instance, which is suggested as a feature not a bug. It’s exactly the same time of idealism without thoughts of consequence that libertarianism has.
I was going to use communities as my examples due to the relatively small size of each, but decided country was a better metaphor due to each instance’s ability to fully control their own rules or “laws”, where as communities in the real world are usually beholden to the higher laws of their countries.
It really is terrible for building a community here, I’ve been trying to decide the best place to even start and it’s so difficult to know where when most people won’t be able to find it even if they are federated because the discovery system is so weak then there’s the possibility of it not lasting or either defederating or been defederated from…
I think it’s also especially bad for creating insular groupthink communities which are totally closed to other opinions, seriously look at the moderation logs sometime, the mods are really pushing their bias heavily in a lot of places and it’s pushing away anyone that doesn’t conform.
I hope better systems emerge that allow this to be what it was intended but honestly at the moment it just feels like it’s getting more closed.