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.
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.
.world has its issues, mostly because of its behemoth size. Not all bans there would necessarily be a great idea to apply on instances that are an order or two of magnitude smaller. Their needs and approaches to moderation differ in enough ways that an auto-copy would probably not be advisable, unless we can reliably categorize them. If we can tell a ban comes because of CSAM, or something like that, that would make sense to immediately copy. But a behavioral / rule break sanction is much more closely tied to the specific instance rules and moderation standard.
Every instance will have its own approach to moderation. Almost by definition, since disagreement with an instance’s policies is a good reason to spin up your own one. .world was my home instance for a while, I would not say they have more issues than other instances. I left them because their policies on piracy related stuff. I understand their reasons, so it’s my issue, not theirs. Anyway, yes CSAM (and spamming?) should be a prompt fediverse wide ban and delete, as long as we can trust the decision makers
Well, I think the size of their userbase naturally poses a higher workload for admins and mods. So they naturally will have a lower tolerance for any risqué behavior, by sheer need of expediency dealing with the issues there. So even if a smaller instance shares the rules with them, the way they'd apply the rules are likely to be quite different.