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.
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 think it sounds good only until put in practice.
If 99% is useful but 1% goes against the instance's philosophy, they have to accept this 1%. But if someone involved in picking what is put in this overarching moderation starts pushing this 1% to 2%, 4%, ever more through the Overton Window, it would deteriorate more and more the instances that had to accept the original 1%.
And even without the possibility of intentional sabotage, one rule being applied for every individual instance would still mean instances would need to adapt for the lowest common denominator, meaning a slow end of individuality. And if a small instance is no different than a big one, those bigger ones start canibalizing the userbase of the smaller ones.
What I expect to happen, and that already does to some extent, is to clusters of instances with similar interests to form, and by extension being prone to accept aligning moderation and philosophies with their direct allies.
But that's still mostly a bilateral move, not an one rule to govern them all, so dependence or independence is still tied to individual interests.
My idea is to limit the scope of the rulings to be limited to very basic laws (like preventing illegal material). Everything outside this scope is still the sole matter of the individual instances. It is like the International Court of Justice, only to judge based on common rules, while not interfering with "local politics" (while it can be used to get consent of all participating instances for other procedures).
When it is visible that judges use their position to apply rules of their home instance to everyone else, they should be voted out.
Illegal in one country may not be in another. Like in Brazil, to my knowledge there is not rules against console mods and game dumping, but in Japan console mods are illegal and in the USA dumping Nintendo cartridges. Furthermore, in the Brazilian constitution, one of the opening statements is that "you shall not do or cease to do anything if not in virtue of law".
So in this example, if 3 instances are tied by such an external organization, one for each country, which will be breaking their local laws to allow or not discussion on modding and dumping?
And on judges being voted out, Brazil also works as an example: Ill-intended judges just need to sit quietly enough for long enough until they have a majority, and then they can rule as they please.
By that point they'd be using different instances of the Dredd software, I'd guess, so hopefully this would be avoided