Thinking about FOSS-in-spirit MMO design

MMOs versus FOSS - tl;dr the entire way an MMO is structured means you can't do any hard anti-cheat and still have your game be FOSS

Adrian's post with discussion

My abridged comment:

the only alternative i can come up with that doesn't require the entire playsim to be server-side-only is to have a decentralized mmo (w/opt-in federation if there's to be any at all) where individual admins are strongly encouraged by both word and UX to actively vet players and run instances in a way that's conductive to ppl identifying with it as part of a community

Which raises the question: what sort of design features would encourage this?

Brainstorming some beneath the cut.

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I am aware that all of this offloads a lot of power and responsibility onto a server admin. Perhaps there's some way to distribute this authority in a communally-controlled server setup, but that is beyond the scope of this brainstorm.