| I'm active with Mastodon and absolutely love its moderation model. In a nutshell: - It's made up of a bunch of independent servers, or "instances". The common analogy here is to email systems. - If you want to join the federation, stand up an instance and start using it. Voila! Now you're part of it. - My instance has a lot of users, and I don't want to run them off, so it's in my own interest to moderate my own instance in a way that my community likes. Allow too much in without doing anything? They leave. Tighten it so that it starts losing its value? They leave. There's a feedback mechanism that guides me to the middle road. - But my users can leave for greener pastures if they think I'm doing a bad job and think another instance is better. They're not stuck with me. The end result is that there are thousands of instances with widely varied moderation policies. There are some "safe spaces" where people who've been sexually assaulted hang out and that have zero tolerance for harassment or trolling. There are others that are very laissez faire. There's a marketplace of styles to choose from, and no one server has to try to be a perfect fit for everyone. I realize that this is not helpful information for someone who wants to run a single large service. I bring it up just to point out that there's more than one way to skin that cat. (That final idiom would probably get me banned on some servers. And that's great! More power to that community for being willing and able to set policies, even if I wouldn't agree with them.) |