Last I checked (almost a year ago fwiw) you had blocks, mutes, and the ability to specify for your node how much you gossip in terms of how many hops you are away from the source.

What I'm interested in is something like the ability to subscribe to a trusted source's moderation in order to inherit their blocks and mutes, or at least to penalize certain content that is less likely to be trusted or interesting.

> Is there some form of filtering available? Ie, only show posts from friends and friends of friends?

That is the default, there is no global state nor consensus. It will only fetch and store content 2-degrees (of following) away from you.

The problem here is how SSB is used in practice; most content is not passed p2p, but through a single hub. This isn't part of the design, it just happens to be how they're bootstrapping right now. But it does mean that number of hops is not a good proxy for actual social closeness.

Is that still the case? It was like this 3 years ago when I last tried it. Sounds like in practice SSB is just as centralized as a standard client-server network.

It's optional. There are some benefits to relying on a hub such as having the ability to follow channels of interest the hub hosts and structured similarly with hashtags on twitter.

There's a new feature, rooms[0], that allows members to replicate with one another and stores nothing.

[0]: https://github.com/ssb-ngi-pointer/rooms2