I don't know much about Mastodon as yet. I've treated it like Twitter and Facebook and all other social medias - with suspicion, never giving them much time, so never becoming social much online.
But thanks for this heads up on federated platforms in general, it sounds cool, I will check it out soon.
I hope more folk running servers will become energy aware.
By that, I mean the mathematical signing of energy.
If a server is powered by extracted energy, (In other words, energy for which there are bills), then the server has to be for profit, even if it claims not to be.
Somehow, the bills for the energy used by the server need to be paid, otherwise it has to die by being switched off, or switch to a free energy source. So the energy for any large conventionally powered platform needs to be supplied by users, usually via their money.
The alternative is to power the platform by a free energy source.
There is only one free energy source, that is solar.
This is the only source that pushes Joules to Earth, and thus to us, for free, no energy or labor of extraction needed.
When solar is used to power all servers of a platform, and the platform is seen to be valuable, by having many users, then the platform owner(s) are incentivised to maximise the value creating capability of the platform, by adding in more valuable features with no impact to users, only benefit.
Just paying users a fraction of the wealth generated from the solar facility hugely boosts the Metcalfe utility factor of the platform, potentially above unity.
We have yet to see that, a platform which provides a UBI from the solar facility supplying all power to the platform.
Notice this is enabling the scenario that you mentioned, of expressing power by rewarding for good done, rather than taking away, for bad done.
More power needed by the platform at any time can be supplied by scaling up the solar collection capability. That can be done freely if there is another product being created from the solar capability in addition to the platform, like hydrogen, or even food (See "Solein" ).
Hydrogen generation gives the solar facility the capability for 24/7 availability of energy from solar, at the same time as being itself a valuable product capable of powering transport, and generating food, in a form like Solein.
Notice the direction of energy flow through the users and platforms in each case, solar powered, and non solar:
Top-down, for solar, from platform to users, to the ground.
From any other source it is ground-up, from the ground, through users, to the platform owners.
These directions need to be signed mathematically, in order to be able to distinguish between them.
Positive, for top down, from sun to Earth, and negative for bottom up, from Earth to sun.
Do that, and when a mixture of platforms using top-down and bottom-up energies is put together, as is normal during transition of an entire platform from one to the other, there is no confusion as to what revenues are due to who.
In normal every day life, we might see above reflects a community structure that can be reflected to actual physical communities and neighborhoods.
Right now, the same problem of unsigned energy is manifesting all over the world.
Sorting it out, is slow so far, but will change to suddenly, very soon, as far as I can see.
The sooner the better, I hope you might also see.