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.
Then we would need to convince every platform dev to implement it with a predefined standard and wait for the release. With the independent server + bot approach it gives more flexibility and every server admin can add the service without the platform to support it.
But then it would depend too much on the views of one instance. Every instance has their own set of rules, which is their right and is fine. But not all instances would like to apply the mod decisions based on rules they might not even have. With a common 3th-party jury mod actions are limited on only a set of rules all instances agree on, while they can apply more fine-grained rules themselves and not interfering with other servers.
This is also a big problem with following mod actions of a server which also publishes posts. There will be a bias and if that server has beef with someone else, it will lead to injustice.
Also another thing about "feed people can subscribe to": this proposed system is not for curated blocklists between users or such. It is for actions which have to apply to whole instances like account purges to ensure illegal media is not distributed.
I think 1) and 2) are kind of what makes the Fediverse fun. We're not just an accumulation of sometimes compatible servers. We do make an effort to span one big, interoperable network and put in the effort to standardise and find common solutions. And we also try to offer means to individualise the experience on different instances.
I'm afraid we also have additional issues with different jurisdictions. I mean I'm a server operator based in Germany. I have different rules for hate speech than for example someone based in the USA. How I can and can't phrase certain things. The UK has some different/strict internet laws. And someone from Japan for example has a whole different set of rules for some kinds of posts... It'd be difficult to come up with a central solution which isn't some lowest common denominator. Which probably will be overblocking in this case?
It should be lowest common denominator with underblocking; so the intersection of rules, not the union. If one needs more strict blocking, nobody stops them. The court is not supposed to replace instance local moderation, just to augment it to allow more swift central decisions on certain topics.
Also the implementation can allow following more than one court. So for example once for international internet law (really lowest common denominator) and one for German internet law.
Guess we're going for different goals, then.
For me in the role of an instance admin, I'd like some solution which properly cuts down on work that ends up on my plate. I'd rather have something so I can pool resources with other admins. I feel technically, it's not all that different from your suggestion, so I'd just go the extra mile and maybe that'd be something to properly rely on. I mean ultimately one of my main responsibilities is to enforce law and the rest of moderation comes second to that. But I'd also use whatever people have to offer to at least make it a bit easier.
And nobody wants to see all the spam, nor do I want to get nasty pictures in a DM. All that stuff should disappear more swiftly.