The total anonymity aspect is seductive. Say anything without it being tied to any one user. Lots of toxic and nasty shit comes out of that, but also some crazy ideas and high concept stuff that might never gain traction because nobody wants to go on record about it.
X is heavily moderated compared to 4chan. Its just moderated to favor right wing views now. Plus the heavy amount of control the algorithm provides in shaping peoples content bubbles.
Not so sure that's true though. If you look at a 4chan threads in some boards, you can recognize the individual anonymous' from the ID next to them.
I suspect it's using either a cookie, or the IP address to track a user and while not storing that info, generating an ID hash from perhaps a unique ID for the thread + their details.
No reason you couldn't federate using the same. But, even without that, each post and comment has a post ID and replies would be tracked that way. Just, you'd need to remember which replies were your own.
The home instance could store for a thread some info about posts/comments from an IP or cookie too and highlight them. But that info wouldn't be federated.
I actually don't think it'd be a problem, really. But, is this something missing from our lives? I'm not so sure.
When you post in a thread you get an ID for that thread. When you post in a different thread you get a different id.
The only way i could see it working is following a particular board on an instance. So I might follow the fitness board on the chan.nz instance and id see all threads pop up and I could open them and view the comments just like on lemmy or mastodon. Actually I think that would work.
How does 4chan's design differ from traditional forums, really? There's less moderation and more anonymity than you might usually expect, but the very nature of ActivityPub means that aspect doesn't really make as much sense in a federated forum.
So do you just want something like Lemmy but without nested comments or upvoting, and only sorting posts by new and comments by old, the way a traditional forum does? For that you might be able to try LemmyBB which is a front-end to Lemmy that says it's supposed to look like phpBB forums. (Unfortunately I can't verify because the two domains its Readme claims run that software are both no longer active.) Or you could try Morum, forum software based not in ActivityPub but Matrix. There are also plugins for non-federated forum software, like Discourse which aim to enable ActivityPub integration with their forums.
Is there some other feature of 4chan that you want to see?
has the largest weekly trans megathread in the entire fediverse, a supermajority of non-cishet users, aggressively bans racism, bigotry and transphobia on sight, has hard-coded mandatory pronoun tags
I'm fairly sure I've seen an NNTP based imageboard that distributed it's content through that protocol and different instances had overlap of boards.
That's about the closest match to federated system you're going to find with this model I think.
Interesting concept. Not something I'd want to interact with personally though.