Are we decentralized yet?

Moderation is definitely Fediverse’s weakness.

https://roost.tools is working on open-source options for both social (fedi or not) and beyond social. Generally the idea is that we can fight the bad things better if we are working together instead of independently

ATProto's Stacked Moderation is an interesting approach to combine platform, community, and user level choices

https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...

I'm curious if you could expand on this observation? I've heard this from other Mastodon users but I haven't seen it myself; I wonder if it varies heavily from server to server or if I've just gotten lucky.

Moderation (the intent and success) varies to such a huge extent that it's practically silly to talk about moderation on Mastodon unless you mean moderation on a specific mastodon server (like mastodon.social). But moderation (the process) is intense and servers are usually community run on the change found in a spare couch (i.e. they're volunteers).

I think they do quite well considering the disparate resource levels, but some servers are effectively unmoderated while others are very comfortable; plenty are racist or other types of bigot friendly, but the infrastructure for server-level blocks is ad-hoc. Yet it still seems to work better than you'd guess.

Decentralization means whomever runs the server could be great, could just not be good at running a server, could be a religious fundamentalist, a literal cop, a literal communist, a literal nazi, etc etc. And all have different ideas of what needs moderating. There is no mechanism to enforce that "fediverse wide" other than ad-hoc efforts on top of the system.

What even is "moderation" at this point? I'm not sure this word is used as defined on paper dictionaries. It is a codeword for something else, like censorship or influencing or artificial control of public opinion?

Because, if it's purely about filtering out content not desired by users, it could be nearly trivially done at the edge, automatic and completely de-humanized, and the word as appearing lately doesn't read that way to me.

Thank you for the clarification; that makes sense.

It is perhaps also worth noting that the Fediverse architecture does nothing to remove racists or bigots from the possibility of being found in the "fediverse" (here referring to the collection of all servers using the protocol and not the protocol itself), and... That's pretty much as-intended. Truth Social uses Mastodon as its backend; there is nothing the creators / maintainers of Mastodon could, or by design would, do to shut it off. The same architecture that makes it fundamentally impossible for Nazis to shut down a gay-friendly node makes it impossible for other people to shut down a Nazi node; there is merely the ability of each node to shield its users from the other.

That's a feature of the experiment, not a bug, and reasonable people have various opinions on that aspect of it.

I get where you're coming from, and I have largely the same sentiment, but it's obvious that you've never had any experience running a platform, or using one with no/few rules. You need baseline moderation, even if it isn't super ideological. You've got to keep pedophiles and misanthropes out at the very least.

Sounds like I really should be building one with the AI moderation I have in mind. I kind of have been to random deep ends. Most of them can't be that hard to filter out or steer them away from undesired content, especially in this age of AI...