@kissane@mas.to @anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social
A reputation system gives me alarm bells - China comes to mind. Who is going to set the reputation points, and set the rules? Instance/server-wise, yes it makes sense for each admin to set their own rules - and may the best server win by people voting with their presence on that server. But Fediverse-wise? No society is ever ready, because that's a still a form of domination and control. A co-op is still the best way - and again, servers that like each other will federate with each other - but a standardized reputation system /never/ goes as planned - people will always find a way to become the Judge, Jury and Executioner when deployed on a massive scale.
Instead of systemized thinking, we can look to nature how ecosystems balance themselves organically without invading other ecosystems. Left to her devices, nature will eventually cull out or adapt to an invasive species - if humans don't meddle. Each local environment will regulate if there's good guidelines up front, like you had mentioned in the article. Take for example, where one culture has a certain hand gesture for 'ok', but another culture the same hand gesture is offensive. If we translate that to a global scale, who will say which culture is correct? It comes back to localities - just like natural ecosystems- and that's the fediverse strengths. A reputation system will just further domination and control if someone manages to code it in and normalize it - where again, the minority becomes outliers.
Sorry for the long response - I'm just writing out as these things come to mind, not at all a planned response.
All of that said - a search engine that just shows the most amount of hashtags used isn't a bad idea - rather than crawling the data, it just crawls the hashtags and saves those, instead of the full content.