On a server level users can be reported by users and banned by admins. Mastodon is federated, and individual servers (or even individual users on servers) can choose not to federate with particular servers.
I've seen complaints that cross-server moderation doesn't work well in practice.
That is, a user deliberately joined a server with a moderation policy they liked. They see a lot of content that is supposed to be moderared out. They ask what's going on, and are told that content is being posted on other servers with admins with different policy views. This user is told they can either ban that specific user or ban the whole server. Neither is a good answer.
I don't know (and don't care enough to research) if this is a flaw in the protocol or a specific implementation.
Thanks for the explanation.
If a huge number of "laypeople" flocks to Mastodon, it's very likely that the users will be clustered around one or small number of "major" servers. So basically the admins of that server will become the de-facto moderators of discourse, it sounds like. Is that a reasonable course of events?
Or will the idea be more like "lefties should go to $SERVER1, righties to $SERVER2" and then the two servers don't federate with each other because they find each other's content distasteful?
That is, a user deliberately joined a server with a moderation policy they liked. They see a lot of content that is supposed to be moderared out. They ask what's going on, and are told that content is being posted on other servers with admins with different policy views. This user is told they can either ban that specific user or ban the whole server. Neither is a good answer.
I don't know (and don't care enough to research) if this is a flaw in the protocol or a specific implementation.