One of the questions I don't see answered here (and is, IMO, the greatest obstacle, and the reason I've backed out of discussions to set up a similar geographically-oriented node) is who moderates, say, your city's ActivityPub node? If a corporation, we're right back to corporations moderating public speech. But even having governments moderating speech in a public forum feels weird to me since it provides an easy lever to bend the discourse to the interests of the incumbents.
Or maybe to protect against that, there's a strict moderation governance document for that to the effect of "If it's not illegal, it flies". That could still get rough since there's lots of non-illegal content you could put on there which people wouldn't want to see.
Independently hosted nodes still feel like the way to go to me. No hard authority, just people talking with people and moderating to set the tone they want for their community. If the moderators are jerks, moving to a different node should be easy (thus putting the power into the hands of the users to abide by the governance they find most agreeable) and not cause you to exile yourself from your civic community.
This gets at why I think this is fundamentally a terrible idea. I think it would be a legal and social minefield the likes of which I'm not sure the world has ever seen.
You know how community meetings and town halls are awful and fruitless because they're filled to the brim with the noisiest cranks and they can't be kicked out because they're still members of the public after all, and nobody else participates because it's maddening to be around all those noisy cranks? Like that, but web scale.
I'm sure the noisy cranks would love this, but I'm not interested in it.
I want to acknowledge that feedback, because it’s useful.
As a follow question: is this a solvable problem between host moderation and user self moderation?
In other words: Let’s pretend NPR hosts a Reddit-like site whose primary objective is to facilitate discussion on topics shared by NPR.
NPR doesn’t outright ban everything unless it violates some terrible things.
Could user moderation NPR Reddit also expand on this? So long as they fall under the same guidelines?
I ask this question because it seems to me that there does exist some useful moderation: there are well moderated Reddits and for the most part Wikipedia is also pretty well moderated.
Yes, there are private entities with good moderation. A public entity (in the US) with those same moderation policies would have a very hard time avoiding infringement of the first amendment.
Does there exist a medium between host moderators and user moderation the makes this work?
Wikipedia is self moderated and there are well moderated Reddits. The host of the ActivityPub site doesn’t have to do all the moderation, and there doesn’t seem to be a reason that users themselves couldn’t “mute” troublesome posters from their own feeds, right?
> The host of the ActivityPub site doesn’t have to do all the moderation
The person who set up the server doesn't, no, they can appoint moderators that lack administrative privileges. I don't recall at the moment if moderators have the ability to federate/defederate with peers, and that might be an implementation detail anyway. This is probably the way a large well-run node should work - developing a team of moderators from within the community.
> there doesn’t seem to be a reason that users themselves couldn’t “mute” troublesome posters from their own feeds, right?
This is true as far as it goes, but if a node federates with peers that dump a high volume of content onto the network the user doesn't want to see, then the user will find it a headache to manually filter just what they want to see (approximately the feeling of manually filtering out email spam). So some filtering should be done by the host.
Or maybe to protect against that, there's a strict moderation governance document for that to the effect of "If it's not illegal, it flies". That could still get rough since there's lots of non-illegal content you could put on there which people wouldn't want to see.
Independently hosted nodes still feel like the way to go to me. No hard authority, just people talking with people and moderating to set the tone they want for their community. If the moderators are jerks, moving to a different node should be easy (thus putting the power into the hands of the users to abide by the governance they find most agreeable) and not cause you to exile yourself from your civic community.