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by jazzyjackson 1204 days ago
No, everyone needs to explicitly "choose some list of moderators whose decisions you trust, and subscribe to their block lists"
4 comments

That still implies either: A) Cheese pizza is permitted B) There are a "floor" of rules
This is why free speech is so hard to maintain. There are so many cases where you want to ban or censor something obviously repugnant, but once the power is created to do so, it will be abused, probably as soon as someone you don't like is now in charge.
It really isn't - the cheese pizza lover can make their own instance
"Permitted" is a strong word for activity enabled by a protocol. It implies some moral acceptance from the ones who designed the tool. I think a better word would be "possible". Similar to how e-mail makes it possible to send all kinds of content.
“Cheese pizza” is banned by law in most countries, so it won't be “permitted” either way.
That content is prohibited by law anyway so it's not really relevant to internet moderation standards anyway.
I would nuance that system a bit.

Replace "moderator" with "any peer".

Replace "block" with "vote". (And that vote could be as simple as "up down" or maybe something more sophisticated)

Now everybody you meet (every "peer") has a "rating". Based on the cumulative voting of yourself and your peers.

A peer that you upvote, his votes are weighted-up in that cumulative rating calculation.

A peer that you downvote, his votes are weighted down.

So we have peers, votes and a cumulative rating calculation.

And then we filter out view by rating.

Voila! Personalized decentralized moderation.

This doesn't really work because it doesn't allow a moderator to set the tenor of a community. People can filter out individual messages, but a dedicated set of bad actors can turn a community into swiss cheese or undermine discussion just by spamming, baiting and trolling and taking advantage of the variance in the level of tolerance for the bad behavior.

Communities function when there is a standard to which the community members adhere and when bad behavior is uniformly moderated away. Making each individual have their own moderation bubble is a recipe for incoherence, even with the improvements you suggest. Its also a lot of work.

That is to say, every community is for meme pictures
isn't that what matrix is doing with their decentralized moderation?
You're describing the exact thing people do when logging onto a Mastodon instance. They're choosing to accept the moderation/federation policies of that instance.