GoToSocial has an open issue in their tracker that is related to this topic:
opened 09:18AM - 03 Mar 21 UTC
enhancement
future tech
Instances should be able to subscribe to a public list (some kind of JSON format… hosted on, for example, github or anywhere else) to populate their allow/deny lists. This allows for the possibility of community-moderated blocklists or indeed community-moderated allowlists.
Eg., you have a github repo (or whatever) where people can make PRs to add entries to the allowlist or the denylist. Discussion happens. The entry is added or not. Instances subscribed to that allowlist/denylist update (perhaps every 24hrs automatically or with a manual action or even a git webhook??). If you don't like the list, fork it and make your own. Or just don't use it at all.
Note: this should, of course, happen at an *instance* level not a user level, to avoid targeting individual users.
Update :
An interesting comment added by @not-not-the-imp :
Someone wrote a paper on this and some software that implement something like federated moderationalexander cobleigh - cblgh.org https://cblgh.org/dl/trustnet-cblgh.pdf GitHub - cblgh/trustnet: a flexible and distributed system for deriving, and interacting with, computational trust
cblgh’s trustnet would be a contender, if not for the final mechanism, at least to learn and refine GTS acceptance criteria for a federated moderation system.
Also interesting for @weex in context of Scalable Moderation using a web-of-trust model .