I feel like a lot of conflict around moderation and defederation comes from a pretty insidious (and mostly unmentioned) problem introduced by social media over the past decade or so: the mixing of personal and communal communication.

It used to be that you had online community spaces, and you had personal messaging applications, and these were mostly distinct. Sometimes they used the same protocol under the hood, but they were generally otherwise split.

But over the years, a lot of social media have tried to be the one-stop shop for every form of communication; from the communal to the personal, it all happens in the same place, the same app, often with the same people and even mixed into the same UI (eg. notification feeds).

But these two forms of communication have very different social dynamics! Getting ejected from a community is one thing, but someone deciding that you cannot talk to a personal friend because you *happen* to be in the same community is something entirely different.

These forms of communication warrant different forms of moderation; deciding who someone else can interact with personally rarely goes well, and likewise leaving communal spaces unmoderated (or going user-by-user) is also a disaster. They have competing moderation needs.

You can notice this even here on fedi: when (well-intentioned) people complain about defederation, it's rarely a complaint about being cut off from some part of the network; almost always, it's about not being able to talk to specific friends anymore, because they had been relying on fedi as their personal communication channel too.

Maybe we should... avoid replicating this mistake in the design of our alternative social spaces? Maybe we should reintroduce this distinction between communal and personal communication, and not try to centralize all and any communication onto a single network? And make a more explicit distinction between the two?