Federated Moderation: Towards Delegated Moderation?

[aschrijver]

@tuttle

“United in Diversity” and “Social Networking Reimagined” are nice words, but they are not specific guide lines.

Sure, and you are right. But I was just being introductory based on your introduction and mention of ‘basic principles’
In summary I think we fully agree on the role of technology as merely supportive and adding value.

@tuttle

So IMHO, as custodians I think it would be a good idea to define some basic principals to help guide us to nurture the Fediverse so that it becomes something that improves society instead of being just another media meat market.

In follow-up to you, @pskulski and also on fedi discussion, like here by Bob Mottram where I reacted:

I am not seeking technological solutions for the sake of technology in this brainstorm. Forget the tech, but think of the tech as an abstraction of real-world social relationships. We have modeled the interaction of Fedizens (in the microblogging domain), and we also know that a strong point is the way fedi is moderated on an instance-by-instance basis by real humans. This is a discerning factor wrt traditional social media.

We also know that the current Moderation toolset is not enough. That toxicity also creeps onto the fedi, and instances close down, people moving back to the Twitter et al. See also my breakdown on “Fediverse is Crumbling” article.

Better moderation is crucial. And if in future we were to move towards more task-oriented fediverse - where application and instance boundaries are ‘pushed’ to a lower layer of the techstack - its nature will fundamentally change.

Yet Moderation is not part of Fediverse at all. It exists in the shadows, separately on a different plane, out of sight for most fedizens who depend on it. People take it for granted too: “I just move to this instance and everything will be provided to me”. And when moderation occurs the moderators are seen as an abstract entity, not as humans who do the unthankful job to keep an instance healthy… “InstanceXYZ (them) censured / cancelled me (us)”.

Delegated Moderation provides transparency and openness: “I am a fedizen and a moderator who helps keeps fedi safe and healthy”. That’s it, visibility and recognition of their work. In no way mods will become god-like creatures moderating all-over-the-place. There’s the same control that exists now.

@pskulski

I just rediscovered my old piece on this topic. After three years I still believe this perspective is valid, so I am linking it here as my voice in this conversation. Fake News or Filter Bubble? – Political is personal

[quoting parts from the article…]

IMO you are missing the policy part. I.e. who and how is going to categorize channels as fake news.

What will be the level of agency of community members? Are they expected to participate in the process? How directly? Are they expected to interact with the system all the time, periodically or once-off at the start? Do we want to create a subset of population to deal with moderation? On what basis?

Fantastic article. And once again we see concepts popping up that are ongoing discussion on this forum: Community and Governance.

I won’t go into all the ins and outs, because this post is already long. Just some considerations:

• Federated moderation: Brings moderation activity out into the open (like an audit log), so that the entire community and beyond can be informed in what ways it is taking place. And it can be helpful to avoid filter bubbles caused by ‘Shadow Moderation’.

• Delegated moderation: Brings moderation as an important responsibility for any community out in the open, and facilitates having open and rotating roles doing this work: Distribution of authority based on democratic principles.

Both these ‘features’ of the future Fediverse, built on top of Community and Governance domains, are very much in line with the guidelines set out in the Tyranny of Structurelessness.

Government involvement

@pskulski

I believe these two aspects need clear, public and serious discussion within Fediverse circles, before implementing any tools that could support disempowerment of the people of fediverse. The internet got tamed once. Perhaps right now we have a chance to rewild a part of it, or at least not let the powers that be take control again. I would not be happy to see this opportunity missed.

1,000% agree.

I want to address this separately. It is not directly on-topic for this thread, but a much broader subject area. A broad discussion must indeed be started. There’ll be many topics, meetups and probably projects needed to steer this well.

At SocialHub we created the #meeting:fediverse-policy Special Interest Group, but haven’t done much with it yet. I invite anyone interested in the discussion to join this group, so we can set things in motion.