This was originally a response to @lemm1ngs recent post, but I figured that it suited as it’s own post.
The strong moderation tools for social societies gives us great advantages. The strength is that we don’t live in the centralized wild west anymore. The terms of service are upheld. More moderation can turn communities much more healthy.
On the other side, there’s a power shift. Moderators and admins on an instance can abuse their power. They can exercise power without the transparency of the process, they can change the terms without notice. They can do this without the intervention of the members of the society. They can ban members without notice, they can censor what goes against their own personal agenda. They are the gatekeepers and decide whom can be allowed in and whom are left out, in effect deciding the demography of the instance. They can also abuse power by intentionally ignoring members who overstep the terms in order to keep the population up.
Understanding the weaknesses of the federated social infrastructures makes us aware of how to handle them. We can construct weak or strong systems to combat the worst aspects.
As the fediverse grows, it will be increasingly important to have philosophies around how to govern social societies. Because if we do not have it, we will lack the tools to criticize mismanaged societies. It is very possible to envision a future where we gain a lot of traction, but where a few big societies sabotages the reputation of the fediverse as a whole.
A good philosophy can also coordinate the efforts across societies.
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Abusive admins in active communities like mastodon get cancelled and blocked fairly quickly, usually across most of their network within 24hrs.
On the contrary, large servers with fewer mods per user and a hands-off mentality tend to spout the most vitriol. Like most of the fediverse is now discussing blocking mastodon.social because they don’t maintain a healthy community and it’s spilling out because they can’t contain it. All of the small servers are doing fine and have been for years.
Plus, if you really need full control, you can spin up a small single-user pleroma or misskey server on a raspberry pi.
Moderation is always going to be a thorny issue. Both because it’s politically polarising and because there’s not a lot of people who’s up to the task.
I would honestly have no moderation over bad moderation, except both of them lead to very toxic environments.
