is there a federated platform similar to 4chan ie. topic boards with ephemeral linear message threads? i dunno how else to describe it but I like the 4chan format, it’s just got the worst people in the world on there (which I figure could be mitigated by the federated server type thing)
4chan’s style as a concept doesn’t work too well with the concepts of the rest of the fediverse. There’s no benefit to federating anonymous image and text posts across multiple servers and merging those feeds together. Especially if the content is meant to be ephemeral, why are you wasting bandwidth replicating it? Hell, with the average lemmy server’s replication delay the original content would be gone before it could replicate anywhere.
There’d also be no reason for each “instance” to not be its own separate entity with no federation. It’s not like 4chan really does crossposting between boards, you just can link between them.
Also, having spent far more time on the chans than is in any way healthy, there still isn’t any real solution for good or consistent moderation. Federation doesn’t inherently make moderation better or easier, if anything it complicates things in that regard.
Edit, additional info: Certain threads on /vg/ have been dealing with their own thread specific trolls for literal years with no mod action. Some of the threads have figured out rough schedules of mods based off what type of shit gets removed and when.
Federation is not a magical pill for better quality. I direct you to explodingheads, or plenty of other examples of shit instances documented by fediseer.