Fediverse

I'm not a huge fan of a software solution to this, we already have a large group chat open for instance operators to share and discuss details of user bans, spam, etc. This respects each instances 'culture' while also facilitating communication and dialogue around potential issues.

I think this is an instance owner thing. They run the instances and ultimately who owns and thus mods the communities on their instance. I doubt anyone running an instance would want anything foisted on them. I honestly am more concerned with development that allows users to control their feed as much as possible. Like being able to subscribe to a mod or someones block list. Or even better filter options that allow for complex blocking.

As with anything it depends on who is in control of the moderation or the ones doing the moderation.

And part of it sounds like a centralized layer on top of federation that would just be the antithesis of what the purpose of federation is.

I know you are thinking of csam specifically but as described could end up giving certain mods and instances an essential veto.

Based on certain instances cough lemmy.world and piefed.social I see that going extremely poorly

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 think Pylova (a soft-fork of Piefed) is at the forefront of moderation tools in the threadiverse.

I think their recent addition of shareable user-subscribable block-lists is a good direction to go. I think this can be expanded to instance-level subscribable block-lists. There could be a variety of lists (CSAM, scrappers, scammers, agentics, etc.) and each instance chooses what list(s) to subscribe to or build their own for others to subscribe and contribute to. The lists would be easily fork-able so that any instance can take control of their own moderation, if they disagreed with an addition/subtraction to a list.

For some lists (like scrappers), I think automatic addition could be set up to quickly "inoculate" the rest of the threadiverse against them. Perhaps one approach could be any IP that clicks on a non-user clickable link or gets stuck(?) in Anubis could be added.

I think subscribable block-lists for instance admins could be a great way to protect the threadiverse (perhaps expanded to the fediverse as a whole or just any website in general) against any problematic actors quickly and at the first encounter (alternatively: after (x) # or % of instance admins add them to a list).

Apparently some of these lists may already exist in some form (@Christopher@lemmy.grey.fail: "I was able to implement community maintained blocklists."). So, my thought would be to make sure these lists are a standard format (if they aren't already) that instances can auto retrieve and contribute to.

Anyone: let me know if you have any thoughts or see any issues with the idea (constructive criticism only, please).

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

CSAM

Wouldn't disabling media federation get rid of that part of the problem real fast, to then leave people open to work on the moderation issues such as "federated judging" etc?

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.