Edit: found one: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/7866

TL;DR - free doesn't scale without meaningful accountability

Users should be able to broadcast whatever they want, including highly illegal stuff.

Users should be able to filter whatever they receive, based on their individual preferences.

Sorry, but I disagree here. Even in something that’s decentralized, the user relies on someone and that someone most definitely has the right (and ethical responsibility) to stop the spread of “highly illegal stuff.”

How do you suggest we enforce that?

But there are actors who want to control the spread of information, have some global censorship features in every system with censorship decisions delegated to people who they can influence. These actors are also the ones who invented CP problem to be able do whatever they want to any target with public approval, like making bogus CP claims on anything that doesn't have a global censorship system to force creation of one. They may even upload CP themselves if necessary.

The good thing about ideologies though is that they do push people to protect ideological beliefs. You can't just CP your way into censorship on people with strong believes against censorship.

I've been kicking around the idea of having multiple filter options for each server and each user.

I am very interested in how others would tackle this. Particularly interested in blocking / filter options with matrix and similar systems.

I am imagining a block servers list, block cidr list, and a set of human moderators that can 'add on the fly' to a list they control - these lists being set to block by default. With options to whitelist individual users or ips on a server basis and per user basis.

I'd like to give each user an option to turn off these filters all at once, or whitelist different servers for example.

I also want to have a page showing for example, a blocklist of servers, and a blocklist of users, and a list of the moderators, like a list of nightclub 'bouncers' - so that people can make comments about them - if one bouncer does block lots of bad things, but also blocked a few people who had differing politics for example, it would be nice to have a way to see and discuss that and give people options to have a different bouncer blocking their message box.

There's some of my random thoughts on the issue, I'd like to see what others have come up with. When exploring rocket chat and similar, what I have seen so far is that these comm platforms are working with teams of non hostile users in mind and defending against the kind of issues initially described here is not really something any portal is prepared to handle well. Yet, hopefully. I have been asking about different mod tools and how to implement multiple layers for the various threats / issues.

I also think sometimes people in a group need to be set to not see new users to the group by default, and only after a certain amount of time can a newer user be seen by the main others in a group - things like that.

For example, a rational TOS would not have people banned for complaining about CP on the network. A rational TOS would not ban people for "too many comments" on a github issue ticket without defining what the time limits for posting are. Spam is unsolicited commercial advertisment posts, so those are a clearly-defined special category.

I think meta-moderation, where people are randomly assigned to review each other's mod actions for sensibility, and some consensus/reputation score could be utilized to arbitrate that. I also think random rotation of moderatorship to people with good recent reputation/kharma over a 6 or 12 month period could be utilised, to great effect, to prevent "tyrant" mods.

In a federated network such as Diaspora, I think you need some tools for federation of the moderatorship actions, such as the ability to share blocklists among pods, with standardized TOS terms that several pods could subscribe to. That's what I suggested in their github issues system, right before they banned me.

So I think it's great to have these kind of blocklists available to pods / servers / whatever instances, but I would like to see it as opt in, and selectivley able to opt out of whichever ones for any reason by the server / instance operator, and I think it should be optional for the users to opt out of whichever blocklists as well.

I can imagine there are many server/instance operators that would not want their users to be able to override the blocklists and I think that is fine, but I would also want people to post publicly, or at least available to their registered members, which lists were being used - so some transparency in the censoring.

I also think there needs to me be more safe space options, as I mentioned above - perhaps "rooms" where only known users who had been around for X amount of months or whatever could enter -

because, I think no matter how many blocklists are made, no matter how many cidr's are blocked, the truly evil trolls will find ways to circumvent the blocks, and they will get in, and they will post things you and your users do not want to see - and blocking them will make it more of a game and more of a win when they do get in,

So things can be made a bit better I think, but unless you enter a password protected chat area with just you and one other person you know - not being open to anyone else in the world - there is going to be risk. To think that any kind of shared censor list is going to make a magical space safe is not considering the ability and desire of those who want to ruin it.

On some of my sites I have several million ip addys blocked, a few countries via geoip, and yet I have still spent more than a dozen weeks of life researching ips for proxies / VPN, blocking those subnets, writing to ISPs and companies, filing complaints, contacting police in multiple countries, putting together evidence, dealing with lawyers, censoring "bad words" - all kinds of things.

In the end, I have limited some of the bad stuff that was posted by people who did not read our rules, I have stopped some of the spam bots. But, there is a kid in Canada that still comes in and ruins the whole thing for dozens of our users pretty much any time he wants. Sometimes its several times a day, sometimes it's once a week. I have found no way to actually stop it 100%.

So I look forward to some of these newer apps getting stronger with multiple moderation abilities. I do think we need to be careful forcing any one, or multiple people's ideas of what should be blocked on other people - as I have had good moderators and bad ones, and some that blocked some people for the wrong reasons - and deplatforming the non-popular is not the reason for the mod powers imho - and even with lots of mods we can't stop it all.

you've apparently seen much of this ebb and flow over the 7 years and finally had enough - I can relate, it's not easy. One of things we decided was forced vacation breaks for the mods to keep sanity and perspective.

The more options the better imho, so long as they are optional.

Yes, I agree with this. The end effect of this will be self-partitioning of the network, however, I think.

There are actually some pods who do a great job of tracking down bad users, and they have a full staff, and I trust their podmins. I should be able to offload a lot of the work of gatekeeping a TOS standard, to them, if I desire.

I totally agree it should be optional too. I clearly stated that in my posts to the D* github issues. But they just banned me, said trying to take action to moderate CP off the network was censorship, and they were going to ban me for it, ironically. That's when I started suspecting the D* core devs may actually be protecting their CP network, or even possibly profitting from the CP on their network.

If it's helpful to you, there are many other decentralized networks. So far as I can tell, Mastodon has better moderation controls that can block entire instances. It doesn't stop bad things from happening. The only confort I can gleam from that is that those who do/say terrible stuff do so at the risk of being seen and discovered.

Here's an interesting discussion where they talk about how users shouldn't be banned from discourse / loomio, which I found interesting, though:

https://discourse.diasporafoundation.org/t/banning-users-fro...

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/7865

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/7866

And this one :) This is the thread they said was relevant to the discussion and that I should comment on, and then they banned me for "spamming" their issues ticket system when I commented on it.

That said, I'd expect a discussion on this topic to be welcomed. The only reason they could reasonably be annoyed by you is if you keep rehashing points they've already discussed.

In that case, the right approach would be to read and understand how their current moderation tools work, the reasons why they work that way, and their reasons for not doing the thing you propose. If they don't address your concerns, state your case clearly and unambiguously (in one github issue you seemed to be arguing for centralised moderation, which is obviously not going to happen; emphasise that it's a voluntary choice for podmins who don't want to manually block repeat offenders) and explain why their current system doesn't address this.

That said, Diaspora development seems to be incredibly slow, so maybe they're not very eager to add completely new features that not many people are interested in. Understand that if you're not going to write this code, it's probably not going to happen.

But if childporn is really clearly a problem, and Diaspora is clearly unwilling to address the issue by considering tools to help podmins, then posting on a blog of your own could be a good way to initiate that discussion in a way that they can't block.

In my view this alone would be a good reason for you to be banned and cast out from those groups. FWIW I am not involved in those groups and I don't even know what happens in them, but the fact that you used such a title to draw attention to your cause shows that you have a cause which is not compatible with their ethos and other such decentralized systems.

Decentralized networks have arisen in response to centralized and privately controlled services like Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Paypal and Patreon which use they term hate speech, neo-nazi, populist as excuses to ban those whose political and social views they disagree with, and you seriously expect them to adopt some sort of centralized control system. Good luck to you.

The same can be said of the TOR network, which seems to have become a system abused by all kinds of shady operators, with child pornography networks, bitcoin extortionists, Islamist propaganda networks among those operating behind the anonymity it offers.. Are there any calls for some kind OPTIONAL federated moderation systems for the TOR network?

How about Cloudflare, which has also come under criticism for protecting shady actors?

As for the child porn issue, the Internet itself can be seen as a child porn network irrespective of what tools or services are used to access it, and the same can be said about its so called relationship with hate speech. As Jordan Peterson asks, who defines what hate speech is?

As for the OPTIONAL part, things which are optional eventually morph into mandatory systems, with the possibility of operators who don't subscribe to such services being blocked simply for not using it..

Take a look at an organization such as Spamhaus, a supposedly optional but privately owned and controlled service, all the criticism and complaints of their abuse and misuse of a power over the years, and ask yourself why an organization committed to decentralized communication woud want such as system at the core of the services it provides.

I say this again, good luck to you!!

IMHO people who scream CENSORSHIP when you start talking about removing CP and going after child predators, are usually child predators.

You didn't write about CP posters that you blocked or banned only for them switch to other pods. Any reason for that omission? You see, insinuations can work both ways.

The truth is you want moderation for other things besides CP, and you are using CP to draw attention to your cause.

You are already making insinuations like:

> "Or maybe you just think CP is cool huh? Are you one of the D* core devs, is that why you are defending this network where child sex abuse pictures are being posted every day?"

> "IMHO people who scream CENSORSHIP when you start talking about removing CP and going after child predators, are usually child predators."

Your behaviour is like some militant activists and SJWs who vilify and impugn people innocent people for no other reason that they don't share their views or subscribe to their causes. You might as well say that people who support and defend the 2nd amendment right to bear arms support mass murderers who go on killing sprees line Sandy Hook etc, and enjoy seeing the aftermath of such events on television. Do you characterize all defenders of the second amendment in that manner?

The whole point of decentralization is to avoid the very kind of controls you seek to have implemented. In any case the proper thing to do is for end users to have the kind of software that screens out users they don't like. If end users want to share their lists that is fine, centralizing the process without total transparency and accountability defeats the very idea of decentralized networks. There is no such thing has having your cake and eating it.

stevenicr has already made some comments along such lines, but without a transparent process which allows users final control on what they see or cannot receive you are bound to wind up in the Spamhaus situation. The end user must have the final say.

Since it is also a software issue, have you considered forking the software and implementing the changes you want, and letting pod administrators choose which software they prefer? That is a saner approach than casting innuendo about the software developers.

> I would ban you for such an attitude.

Well, then you are a would-be censor, and it's a good thing you can't ban everyone everywhere, or else the whole world would fall silent and the only sound would be of your waxing nonsense. All those "spammers" with their "spam" complaints about CP, amirite?

If you think people should be banned from discussions because they won't stop complaining about all the CP on the network and how they can't legally run a pod anymore, well that's the attitude I'd expect from a CP network admin.

You have made your suggestions, they have been ignored and you have been banned from the relevant discussion groups.

It is quite obvious that the solution is a software issue, that what you want is a change to the software.

Then what you have to do is to seek out some like-minded pod administrators, have some discussions with them, gather whatever necessary resources required to fork the software and get going.

The software is open source, isn't it?

That is a whole lot better than accusing some software developers of aiding and abetting the distribution of CP, which can be said of the whole of the Internet itself.

> hey you know what you should do with this CP platform? FORK IT!!!

LOL, no. I have no interest in working on the D* project, ever again, my focus has now turned towards working with law enforcement to hold them accountable for aiding and abetting distribution of CP.

If the Diaspora Foundation wants to insult and ban podmins who complain about CP, then it's only logical that the response of those podmins should be to start criminal CP complaints against them.

Does deploying the software make you automatically a member of D and the Diaspora Foundation?