Something I believe may be warrant discussion is how each instance is beholden to the rules of another by virtue of federation. Something that has given way to vibes-based reporting which our administrator has been unable to act on.
This has, unfortunately, resulted in the slander of our instance. Branded as allegedly being "anti-moderation" and "bigoted" for choosing not to punish their users over frivolous reports or engage in the fediblock of the more fringe or controversial instances on here ourselves.
So Fedizens, what are your thoughts?
Tags: #FediAdmin, #MastoAdmin, #ServerAdmin, #Moderation, #Moderation, #Moderators, #FediMods, #MastoMods, #TrustAndSafety, #SocialMedia, #Sociology, #FediMeta, #Fedi, #Federation, #Fediverse, #Politics, #Fediblock, #Blocklist.
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The thing about federation and moderation, independently, is that everyone thinks they can do it better and that you should do what they think is right. So federation x moderation is that problem effectively squared.
We do actually have an issue somewhere in AP T&S about federating instance rules, so effectively making it such that when you on server A go to report a user on server B the UI can ask you "do you think this violates just your rules or server B's rules too?"
Today that's not possible because there's no standard protocol for communicating this data. Hopefully after we introduce Moderation Actors we can have those have a Collection of rules or policies, making that data available on protocol
Having some moderation functionality embedded at the ActivityPub layer would definitely help in streamlining the moderation process between two instances. Hopefully you'll be able to add functionality that useful the developers of Fediverse software would be incentivized to interact with the standard.
Something we've been doing at Neondystopia.world that the culture of the Fediverse could benefit from is comparing our rules against those of the instance from which a report originated. That way, we can determine whether a violation occurred and inform what our next course of action would be to address the issue.
By providing a way for the staff of instances to communicate directly between each other and expose that communication to the appropriate designated roles, violations could be discussed in an open and transparent manner and facilitate closer cooperation between instances in doing so. Helping shape a better culture where defederation and frivolous reports aren't the first course of taken action.
That said, when you start considering how two instances can communicate with each other in a manner that respects designated roles, you end up moving beyond the scope of a protocol into feature implementation for Fediverse software.
@thisismissem@activitypub.space