The more steps, the less effective any moderation is going to be.

I literally just reported about 50 or so spam posts, manually, for a message that was being posted by new accounts with only one or two posts, each to a different communities and instances, seconds apart, each username related words with a number that changed, account age less than a day.

In other words, an automated spamming engine creating accounts across multiple instances and posting at scale.

Think USENET Green Card from the early 90’s, a pivotal moment in spam history. This is the tip of the iceberg.

You cannot fight this with judges and voting, you need a better approach.

I’m not sure how a process modelled off of a tribunal is supposed to act as a fix to mods or admins not acting quickly enough. Trials and tribunals are notoriously slow, because they are called when correctness is more important than speed.

By design, these are not vehicles for “swift actions”.

If a certain website is known to have a problem with their moderation, then that’s what server block lists are for. Communal server block lists already exist. Having a standardized format and the ability to subscribe to one would be nice, but as of right now the amount of effort to update a server’s block list with a new version is relatively simple.

The thing is, as the fediverse grows, and especially as the group-based part of the fediverse grows, we have to accept network splits as a natural part of that process. It is going to get patchy here. It’s a natural part of social network development. What we need to get ahead of is showing people that that is OK, and that frictionless access to the whole of the social web isn’t necessarily a good thing.

I’m not sure about centralization but delegation would probably make more sense. So I could delegate my own instances moderation to a instance I trust. This way we still can have seperate ways of moderating so the Tankies can moderate their stuff, the Nazis their stuff, Liberals theirs, etc. pp.

I recently learned about discourses trust levels:

blog.discourse.org/…/understanding-discourse-trus…

They’re pretty smart.

Overall, my utopian vision for the fediverse is local servers per interest, with members who willingly participate because they value the community, including paying for server costs. These local communities then moderate according to their rules and servers block each other based on preferences.

In that utopian model, spam is not an issue, because the members are locally known, you don’t even really get in without some kind of invite or knowing someone.

I would be against some overarching court that has the potential to make decisions I disagree with. The freedom of the internet is precisely in not being governed by something like that. Including communities around “wrong opinions” and “disgusting content”.

Everyone can post a case via normal Fedi posts to the court and the elected judges give a verdict via majority vote. Once a case has a verdict, all instances should immediately apply the decided action against the offending content / account.

My immediate thought reading this was, how does that work across jurisdictions? Is the idea that every jurisdiction runs its own instance of this software? Something illegal in one jurisdiction might not be in another.

There's also the question of representation. Does every (lemmy/mbin/piefed) instance get the same representation? If there's proportional representation, that just promotes centralization of the fediverse. If there's not, you can just set up new instances to manipulate the vote.

And the task of the court is to defend universal rules all following instances agree on.

Sure, but are there checks and balances which ensure that?

Just as food for thought, there has also been an idea in the opposite direction - decentralize voting even more

This is especially problematic as media […] gets duplicated to every receiving instance.

I’m not sure this is actually the case. The posts certainly do get duplicated to every instance, of course, but the media contained in them are always hosted by the originating instance, as far as I can tell. So once it is deleted from there, no one can access it anymore.

I think it’s an interesting idea though. Since you mentioned votes by members of the individual instances, I wonder how you would handle the different sizes of instances. I’m the only user of my instance, for example. I probably wouldn’t be able to be judge then, right?

This is a way for white people to abuse power dynamics and harm marginalized people.

Moderation is a skill and requires experience, more than most moderators have. It’s ideally a paid role that people have to compensate them for the difficult work they do.

The mentality that its free or non-skilled work is due to tech companies being terrible role models for morality, worker equity, and justice. You cannot imitate these systems to succeed, they are based in bottomless pits of money that they use to squash human rights violations.

Judges in court systems are ideally well trained and experienced in the law. Its a paid gig and prone to being terribly abused.

When some instance that wants mutual aid posts to disappear gets a “judge” to do this would you tell the disabled person on your instance that they cannot ask their community for help? Where would you tell them to go when the people who make the most impact are cut off? Would they be banned for that? What choices to people harmed by “judges” have when they are targeted unfairly?

The amount of overhead managing moderation on one instance can be difficult, but sifting through decisions made by a bunch of anonymous “judges” sounds like an utterly depraved torture chamber. In the end the choice would be whether the instance agrees with the (unqualified, unvetted, unpaid) “judge’s decision” which ultimately brings this back to where we are now.

I administer my own instance of Lemmy and Mastodon. The CSAM issue was something I learned about real quick, unfortunately. I was able to implement community maintained blocklists. It’s not perfect, by any means, but I’ve not seen any more harmful content.

The idea of a centralized judicial system does not seem compatible with the spirit of federation. The safety we expect from centralized platforms is something we gave up for our freedom. With that, we do have to be diligent and deal with the bad actors. It’s the worst trade off in the whole deal.

It’s also impossible to enforce, I think. The Rage Against the Machine “f you, I won’t do what you tell me” spirit lives in all small server admins (by virtue of rebelling in the first place).

Interesting idea. Not an instance owner, and not familiar with the finer details of federation, so no idea if it could be done. My initial concerns is that a majority vote won’t work, if you have to wait for the majority of instance mods to vote it’s going to be too slow. Maybe some degree of instance level config helps. For example, if i had my own instance, i would follow ban/delete recommendations from the likes of .world, .dbzer0, but maybe not from .ml without a human reviewing it first. Also need to ensure the ‘court’ does not get flooded.

It does sound like a decent idea, just not sure how it will work with the different ideologies of the Lemmy instances.
Things that are banworthy on one instance are not banworthy on another.

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.