alt Hacker News> No channel modes and no channel operators, which is a decision rather than a gap: a global channel is owned by nobody, so there is nobody to be an operator of it. Blocking is per person and per instance instead
That's completely unworkable. Lets say I create #some_minority, and people from many different servers join. Some shithead comes and starts screaming slurs at us. Now the admin for every server must block that person. Multiply that by every channel, and every admin is responsible for moderating the entire ecosystem. The only way they can do this is with shared blocklists, which have been a nightmare on mastodon.
Replies
[seemingly negative thing] which is a decision (after hindsight), rather than a gap [scope creep]
Ownership of namespaces is such a hard problem, our society has had to form global organizations and some of our most secure distributed systems to make it happen.
Working in the p2p space, scalable namespace ownership that doesn't get instantly ruined by perverse incentives is the holy grail. I don't think it is actually tractable in any "central authority free" system. Don't get me started on blockchains that tether names to the most perverse systems available and call it victory.
If this is really distributed, then off the top of my head I imagine you could possibly make some sort of reputation-based filter list wherein trusted admins can subscrbe to each other's filter lists such that when one admin blocks are user, it quickly propagates to other admins' lists. Somewhat similar to how email domain spam block lists work.