I personally find "hate speech" nomenclature quite tedious, but dealing with undesired content is handled via the usual Matrix methods[1]... since that is what underlies Cactus. You may have to self host though, i'm not sure if Cactus themselves give access to these features if you rely on them for hosting.

[1] https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation

> I personally find "hate speech" nomenclature quite tedious

I first encountered 'hate speech' as a wide eyed teenager in the 1990s on a gaming IRC room that I hung out in. Somehow my ethnic background came out, and it was bizarre: the entire room either turned against me with racist hate speech, adding that they knew where I lived based on my ip (didn't think this was possible, but then didn't know anyone to ask if it was) and would come beat me up or worse. Or they just went silent and wouldn't stand up for me. I asked the moderators to help and I don't think they ever replied; certainly they never did anything. It was terrifying, and it made me clock out of IRC and online gaming communities for good.

So I wonder, to those who downvote someone asking about moderating (posts on your own blog!) or just consider hate speech as a term to be 'tedius' : have you ever experienced it yourself?

> So I wonder, to those who downvote someone asking about moderating

I didn't downvote and i'm certainly in favor of strong moderation. However automated filters worry me as they have shown time and time again that regexes aren't as sharp as human moderators.

For recent discussions about that on Lemmy, a federated Reddit replacement based on ActivityPub: https://lemmy.ml/post/55323 https://lemmy.ml/post/55143

I had a similar situation happen to me on this very site. I was expressing my concerns about the master/slave terminology and got totally ganged up on, so much so that I abandoned my account that incident occurred on.

I'm really sorry to hear that happened to you here. All these 'free speech' threads seem to attract the most toxic HN users.

I didn’t downvote and I’m very sorry you had/have to go through that. That being said, how I see it is that OP may be referring to the fact that the “hate speech” label is being overused similarly to “fascism” and other similar strong words.

I can't speak on behalf of ta8645, but it's possible that they support banning people who harass or threaten violence, but don't think that banning an ever growing list of ideologically chosen words will do much to solve the underlying problems (and may in fact exacerbate them).

Why tedious? It's a short, accurate, semantically unambiguous description of a non-partisan concept; speech expressing hate. It's the global minimum in tediousness for expressing that and much narrower and more objective than "undesired content".

If words express hate is a matter of context not just words.

Matrix is currently working on improved moderation and curation methods, right? I saw a blog post published to that effect, in response to the last administration's anti-encryption putsch.

>I personally find "hate speech" nomenclature quite tedious,

Why? I think it's quite a useful term that's worthy of discussion from philosophical and legal perspectives. It pretty quickly identifies a range of related behaviors. But I am interested if you have less 'tedious' terms that describe the same thing.

Scanning through the doc, I don't see mention of setting a room to "each message needs approval". Have I missed it?

There is wide diversity of perceptions of what constitutes a hate speech. One size fits all solution seems hardly possible. An ecosystem of plugins / components for each user to choose may be way to go. Front end or back end would not matter as long as each individually user is shielded from an unwelcome content. Much like bayesian spam filers a personal client side AI model would lean evolve along with users attitudes and behaviours. Client side is also good for privacy.

This is an important question, I'm surprised to see it downvoted.

That being said, I would imagine it would be done the same way as an automod type bot for any Matrix room. You'd probably have to implement it yourself though.

Edit: That being said, I don't like the idea of automatic moderation. For small scale blogs, maybe just a manual approval of comments would be worthwhile.

I imagine a share-able blacklist/whitelist system can helps

This is what matrix is working on (except greylists, not block/allow lists), and so would automatically apply to cactus.chat. https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix...