How effective is moderation on Mastodon and other decentralised, community platforms and what are the main issues with it?
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I can answer this directly, as I have my own Mastodon server which I have been running for 4 years. It has about ~200 users, I think, but not many of them are truly active.
Advantages
So the primary superpower of Mastodon moderation, and moderation on similar decentralised platforms, is that you can usually have a pretty good ratio of moderators to active users. Or rather, moderators to problematic users.
In the vast majority of cases Mastodon users tend to behave, so the need for moderation is much lower than on something like Twitter. But even when users don’t behave, it doesn’t take an army of moderators to handle a couple of problematic users.
Rarely will you see a Mastodon instance with thousands and thousands of active users. For example, Fosstodon has thousands of active users, but Fosstodon is also being run by a foundation. It’s not some private server like mine. They have actual money, a board, rules, regulations, etc.
On the opposite side you have my instance with one moderator and basically no money. But I haven’t had a single complaint about one of my users for the past 3 years, and even then it was just one complaint.
So the actual need to moderate anything is kinda low.
Though, my instance is about video games. It may require a lot more moderation on instances where politics and similar topics are common.
So long story short: moderation tends to be pretty effective when you have a good moderator-to-user ratio.
Issues
In my opinion, the number one issue of the Fediverse — and this is not really about the Mastodon software itself — is coordinated defederation and federation pressure.
For example, imagine you have 1000 Mastodon servers. I’m making that number up.
A bunch of them have very similar moderation rules and they broadly agree with each other about what kind of speech should or should not be allowed.
Then you go ahead and make your own Mastodon server with different rules. You allow your members to express themselves according to the rules of your own server.
Because of the federated nature of Mastodon, sooner or later something one of your users says will clash with the rules of someone else’s server.
Then they report your user to you, the moderator of your server, and expect you to punish that user even though the user did not actually break any rules of your server.
If you don’t punish your user, the admin of that other server may decide to defederate from your server.
Basically, they block your entire server so that members of your server and members of their server can no longer communicate.
In theory this sounds half-bad, right?
Shame that the main superpower of the Fediverse — federation itself — is being nullified like that, but then again it’s just one server.
Or is it?
The problem starts when groups of servers coordinate these decisions.
Now instead of one server defederating from you, you may suddenly have 50 or 100 servers doing the same thing.
And sometimes the pressure goes one step further: other servers may be told, either directly or indirectly, that if they continue federating with your server, they may also be defederated from.
At that point this starts to look a lot like a secondary boycott.
Nobody has technically taken away your ability to speak. Your server is still online. Your users can still post whatever is allowed under your rules.
But through coordinated defederation and social pressure, your server can gradually be isolated from a large part of the Fediverse.
And now you are in a situation where, because you refused to punish one of your users for something that wasn’t against your own rules, all of your users may suddenly lose the ability to communicate with users from hundreds of other servers.
That is probably the biggest moderation problem I see with the Fediverse.
The interesting part is that there is no central authority doing this.
Every server admin is technically independent and free to set their own rules, which is exactly how decentralisation is supposed to work.
But federation itself can create a strong pressure for moderation rules to converge anyway.
Bubble
Naturally, over time this creates different moderation blocs or bubbles inside the Fediverse.
You get groups of servers which broadly federate with each other because they have similar moderation standards, and other groups which have very different standards.
So technically everyone is part of the same Fediverse, but in practice different parts of it can become almost separate networks.
And I think this is the strange paradox of Mastodon moderation:
Every server administrator has complete control over the rules of their own server, but if your rules are too different from the rules of a large enough moderation bloc, you can still end up effectively isolated from a significant part of the network.
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Fediblock is one of the large issues with ActivityPub, I agree.
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