As the Fediverse grows, the amount and frequency of harmful spam also increases. The feudalistic structure of the network creates notable moderation overhead as every instance admin has to ban offending remote accounts and remove their content themselves, if the originating instance does not act quick enough or such delete actions are not federated properly.
An example (and my motivation for this post) are reports from the last days about accounts which post CSAM content. This is especially problematic, as media content gets duplicated to every receiving instance.
The following idea came to my mind: A software which sits on top of Activity Pub and creates a kind of court. Instances of this software are independent courts. All users can elect admins / mods of their home instance as judge. Everyone can post a case via normal Fedi posts to the court and the elected judges give a verdict via majority vote (votes are also normal Fedi comments with special formatted content). Once a case has a verdict, all instances should immediately apply the decided action against the offending content / account. This can be done via a bot which is set as an instance moderator and follows the published verdicts of a court instance the local admin trusts.
This way swift action can be applied through all instances which follow the court at once. By having periodic elections it is kept democratic.
And the task of the court is to defend universal rules all following instances agree on. Not to handle politics between instances.
What are you thoughts on this matter? Or do other approaches to solve this issue already exist?
This won’t work for three reasons.
One, technological differences. Not everything in the Fediverse works the same. Not even nearly.
Managed to implement this on Lemmy or Mastodon? Good for you. Now go implement it on Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte.
Two, cultural and ethical differences. Mastodon and Lemmy are both part of the Fediverse. But Mastodon’s culture is not Lemmy’s culture. Far from it. You will notice once you witness for the first time the head-butting between a Lemmy moderator and a Mastodon fundamentalist who is trying hard to force Mastodon’s rules and Mastodon’s ideals and Mastodon’s culture and Mastodon’s everything upon the whole rest of the Fediverse, and who completely disregards the very notion that anything that doesn’t have Mastodon’s culture could possibly have any culture.
Now add even more software to the mix. Like Friendica and Hubzilla which have developed their own cultures with zero influence from either Mastodon or Lemmy, also because they predate both. There’s stuff that’s absolutely bad by Mastodon’s culture and at the same time an integral part of Friendica’s or Hubzilla’s culture.
Three, bias. Software like Lemmy or Mastodon has loads of moderators. In stark contrast, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte lack the very concept of moderators that aren’t admins. Why? Because they have unimaginably highly advanced permissions systems that allow for self-moderation on a level unknown on Mastodon, much less in the Threadiverse. Not to mention that there are many more Mastodon servers than there are Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte servers combined.
Result: Mastodon, with its army of moderators, will overrule Hubzilla’s culture on Hubzilla with Mastodon’s culture which isn’t even compatible with Hubzilla.