This is a friend to friend protocol, so you have the power, and should exercise it, to remove negative influences from your social graph.

I'm not familiar with retroshare but from a quick research it seems you only receive content from people you're connected with and their connections. So it should be pretty straightforward to remove toxic connections

http://retroshare.wikidot.com/en:faq#toc1 (Lost the link where there was an example on how to split a group chat if one person leaves that connected two groups)

And I can imagine it's possible like with ad block plus et al to have local blocklists in your client. Its not like we have this situation elswhere (mail, web) so...

I agree that moderation tools are important :) one of signal's failings is the lack of moderation tooling. You can have small scale group moderation without having government scale surveillance.

You directly choose who you can chat with, you moderate by removing the person I would assume

Zero responsibility? You are always responsible for the things you say, both morally and legally, both here and elsewhere. Even in public spaces like town squares or hn comment sections. (hn sux, lmao.)

If a chat gets toxic by your standards, just leave. No one forces you to stay in a chat where you don't want to be. On the other hand, governments do censor and scan your private messages. Good cryptography and trustable software mitigates that partially but not entirely. Privacy and autonomy are fundamental human rights. Seemingly, the only way to enforce them is by exercising your rights and holding your government accountable.

I'd rather be abused by a toxic community I can willingly leave than be abused by a toxic government who can take my voice away, imprison me or worse. They can do that to anyone at any time. Laws like SLAs are worth the paper they're written on. And so software that prioritizes censorship-free speech is a tradeoff to be made and cannot be personally made -- it has to be made as a group. (Software like anything else can still be outlawed!)

The recent events with governments eroding privacy, consumer rights and other rights is a good reason to be wary and a good reason to get active and start exercising those rights.

Re: moderation. I don't know about the moderation tools of Xeres, but it seems trivial to be able to boot people from the chat.

Use your free speech to be kind to one another.

It's rather a world where every platform is 4chan than a world like the Chinese internet where no platform allows criticising the government.

Not every platform should be moderated.