What are you thoughts about (semi-) centralized moderation? (Updated with a more decentralized idea)
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?
Update:
From this came the idea that instances can follow mod actions of other instances and apply them if x% of other instances did the same.
I think this is an interesting approach which might be better than my proposal. So I would like to hear your thoughts about this too.
I like the idea. Better yet: Don’t put it on top, but make it part of the platform itself. I think moderation is an integral part of a platform and should be baked in.
And another idea: Some other platforms have moderation be some kind of feed. We could expose moderation decisions as some kind of feed people can subscribe to. That way I could say: I trust team XY to do the moderation for me. And someone else could subscribe to a different “court” or team of moderators who are more or less strict. I kinda like that idea as well. But it’s also guaranteed to be (ab)used for the usual political, online ideology/identity war. Not sure if that’s a bad thing or a good thing.
If you combine both concepts, you’d get a solution which isn’t “central”. And it offers customizability to the users, and/or individual instance admins.