The path towards decentralized moderation
The challenge with moderation in digital communication is that disrupting communication often scales better than individual blocking.
In the Freenet Project (where centralized moderation simply is no option) the answer was to propagate blocking between users in a transparent way. That way blocking disruptors scales better than disrupting.
For more info see: The Freenet Web of Trust keeps communication friendly with actual anonymity
If you want to try adding this to an existing tool, there are three steps:
- Check the current state in Freenet: OadSFfF-version1.2-non-print-edition.pdf
- Understand the optimizations needed so this scales to arbitrary size: deterministic-load-decentralized-spam-filter
- Integrate the generic wispwot service and extend it as needed: hg.sr.ht/~arnebab/wispwot
Also here’s some data of the real world communication structure within Freenet that should be useful if you want to test algorithms: The_Freenet_social_trust_graph_extracted_from_the_Web_of_Trust
(wispwot is built in a way that is suitable for federation, because it can work with a shared database that only has different entry points to get your personal view of the trust-graph. But it isn’t widely tested yet)
I hope this helps you tackle these issues, because global-scale moderation without centralized control is one of the huge tasks ahead of us — a task that was mostly ignored in the Clearnet (there were underpaid moderators to burn out after all) but tackled within the Freenet Project more than a decade ago.
I wrote this as a reply to an article about decentralized moderation.