this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Lack of centralized control.
Until there's some kind of organizing central committee of servers that could mutually defederate problematic instances, every server is forced to play whack-a-mole to deal with fascists and pedophiles and the like. Every server can not be an island onto themselves, they should be in communication with each other and then collectively decide on the rules of the federation.
I forsee in the future federation boards, like servers that work together to vote on good/bad actors/instances and from those other instances could subscribe to their moderation. Still open moderation, you can still set up an instance that doesn't adhere to group A or group B's mod lists, but for the vast majority of people you could have a good experience.
For example, dunno how many saw but had to remove an anti-LGTBQ post in a LGTBQ community today. I'm sure I'm not the only mod who removed that from their instance today, it'd be great if there was a way other instance admins could share that and "team up" with moderation.
Like internet countries. Choose a virtual citizenship, vote for your moderator and wait to be disappointed
Poop ~~poop~~
less like countries, but I would view that more like the federation UN, with each instance getting a vote and a majority passes. You're still in charge of your country, but you could say "I like how this group moderates, I'm going to auto apply moderation from them on here", maybe you could choose which communities are automoderated too. If I ever started disagreeing with that group I could unsubscribe and subscribe to a different group's.
For example, the post I mentioned was not in a community that I host, but for my users I had to remove it too. Would just be nice to say "whoever gets there first can remove it"
What if instances could "subscribe" to the list of defederated instances of each other?
So for example. Let's say that Alice and Bob have their own instances, alice.ml and bob.ml. Bob trusts Alice, so he sets up the following rule in bob.ml: "if alice.ml defederates an instance, then bob.ml defederates it too."
Then Charlie starts charlie.ml. It's a bad instance. Alice manually defederates alice.ml from charlie.ml. Bob won't need to do anything - bob.ml would do it automatically.
I feel like this idea would address the issue of playing whack-a-mole, since admins of multiple servers can split the busywork if they so desire, and only with whomever they desire. And there's no risk of a central control going rogue, since there's no central control on first place.
It could be even further refined with more complex rules on when to automatically defederate other instances. Such as taking into account if the other instance did it manually or automatically, or how many among X instances defederated it.
What you eventually get is a single global list that the majority of instances use, at which point every new instance must immediately agree to adopt the list lest they themselves are also immediately defederated.
From what I understand, there are already instances who operate this way.
Not necessarily. Defederating too many instances means that your own instance will get less content; admins know that, so good admins generally avoid doing it unless necessary for the goals of their instances. Couple that with dissenting points (for example: grotesque but morally acceptable content, porn, dumb/low-quality content...), and the odds of said "single global list" popping up becomes fairly small.
Instead I expect to see a bunch of smaller lists, between instances with similar goals, and plenty unilateral subscribing (e.g. A subscribes to B, but B doesn't subscribe to A).
That's good to know. If they do it automatically, this system could be already implemented across Lemmy.
I see that as a pro and a con. If one narcissist manages to get to a position of authority, they canβt derail the whole network. That also means that people can form their own echo chamber islands of like-minded instances. There could be the main island of random interests and then a separate extremist island of all the instances that got defederated from all the big instances. Not an ideal solution, but itβs still better than a fully centralized Reddit.
It's interesting to see the mirror between Fediverse philosophies, and the history of international relations. For every person who believes every physical country should be an autonomous island unto themselves, you'll find someone else who believes every country should be policed by the standards of another country or group of countries.
The fact that we can have this debate on the internet is interesting...but I also find it interesting that the internet was already federated to begin with. And we all see how that turned out. The Fediverse is just an internet within the internet.