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.
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?
From what I'd seen in the announcements of lemm.ee when it was alive (RIP), one concern by the administrator was if the instance should keep local copies of files for as long as possible, as a timed cache, or link to the original instance. So taking it as an example, the technology for local copies does seem to exist on Lemmy at least.
Some software creates thumbnails on the server storage.
That is a problem to discuss after it is decided if the Fediverse even wants such a service ;)
But I'm aware and one possibility would be to limit the number of electable judges from one instance. The upper limit must be in proportion to their user-count to be somewhat representing. But I think instances with only a handful of users won't ever get seats without the jury being way too big. Or they are so popular that they get enough votes from other instance users.