I was thinking about moderation in PieFed after reading @rimu@piefed.social mention he doesn’t want NSFW content because it creates more work to moderate. But if done right, moderation shouldn’t fall heavily on admins at all.
One of the biggest flaws of Reddit is the imbalance between users and moderators—it leads to endless reliance on automods, AI filters, and the usual complaints about power-mods. Most federated platforms just copy that model instead of proven alternatives like Discourse’s trust level system.
On Discourse, moderation power gets distributed across active, trusted users. You don’t see the same tension between "users vs. mods," and it scales much better without requiring admins to constantly police content. That sort of system feels like a much healthier direction for PieFed.
Implementing this system could involve establishing trust levels based on user engagement within each community. Users could earn these trust levels by spending time reading discussions. This could either be community-specific—allowing users to build trust in different communities—or instance-wide, giving a broader trust recognition based on overall activity across the instance. However, if not executed carefully, this could lead to issues such as overmoderation similar to Stack Overflow, where genuine contributions may be stifled, or it might encourage karma farming akin to Reddit, where users attempt to game the system using bots to repost popular content repeatedly.
Worth checking out this related discussion:
Rethinking Moderation: A Call for Trust Level Systems in the Fediverse.
Concerning NSFW in specific: I'm not sure, there might be more issues. I've had a look at lemmynsfw and a few others and had a short run-in with moderation. Most content is copied there by random people without consent of the original creators. So we predominantly got copyright issues and some ethical woes if it's amateur content that gets taken and spread without the depicted people having any sort of control over it. If I were in charge of that, I'd remove >90% of the content, plus I couldn't federate content without proper age-restriction with how law works where I live.
But that doesn't take away from the broader argument. I think an automatic trust level system and maybe even a web of trust between users could help with some things. It's probably a bit tricky to get it right not to introduce stupid hierarchies. Or incentivise Karma-farming and these things.