From a user perspective (I'm not an admin, I don't run a host) I'm concerned about this topic. It's not clear to me the need for centralized censorship lists. What is the problem that isn't adequately handled by current technology (muting, blocking, imposed content warnings)?

Most of the concepts behind bans are personal points of view. For instance, my chosen home server caters to naturists and nudists. Some might like to see us banned as "pornography." Trom.tf courageously hosts @ToplessTopics, a top-freedom advocate who has been banned from just about every other venue as "pornography" or "adult content."

How is this list to be regulated? By the number of votes? What if 99% of the submissions agree to ban a certain religion, or vegans, or economists who wear yellow shirts on Tuesday? What measures protect the voice of the minority or of protesters? What stops the list on an individual's repository from becoming their own property catering to their whims?

I understand admins need to exercise control over issues like bullying, spamming, and conforming to local legal regulations. I'm even okay with certain hosts being marked to hide all media by default, or not showing in the federated timeline. But beyond that I'm leery about ban lists.

@tio @tblock @hypolite @pluralistic @aral @Gargron @dansup @humanetech @amolith @heluecht @informapirata @hankg @snopyta @roko @toplesstopics @xantulon @utzer @jeena

@Tio @utzer ~Friendica~ @Michael Vogel @Amolith @Eugen @Hypolite Petovan @Snopyta @Hank G @Humane Tech Now @ar.al🌻 @Jeena @dansup @Cory Doctorow's linkblog @TBlock @xantulon @Informa Pirata @Cleo McKee
I know I'm late but I didn't check my Friendica account last day, so I'm only seeing this post now.

I have actually brought up this idea of blocklists before, but at the time we were talking about implementing something like that in a peer to peer system, because there are no admins or moderators there, users have to do everything themselves and having such a list can be helpful. And I hear some people saying they don't like the idea of a centralized list, but it doesn't have to be a single list you know, if someone disagrees with the list then they can always fork it and such, this is not a big issue IMO because we've already dealt with these problems in the domain of ad-blocking lists. And its important to categorize the list, so for example if someone is okay with nudity then they can choose to not block that category.

I'd like to know about the moderation tools that fediverse admins have access to. Can an instance admin simply remove an account or an entire instance from their local/global timeline without outright blocking them? So this means that their posts won't appear on the instance's timeline, but if a user follows them directly then they'll see the posts on their home timeline. I believe it would help a lot if admins have the power to do this, because there are some edge cases where they may not feel like banning it entirely, but just to get rid of it from the public's view.

When we're talking about censorship concerns in the fediverse, its important to address how easy it is for users to move instances, and currently with platforms like Mastodon, Friendica, etc, its not so easy. From what I've read so far, Hubzilla does it a lot better I think, because they have this concept called "nomadic identities". And Hubzilla also supports cloning so you can clone your account across multiple instances to make it resilient, how cool is that? 😀
I'm not exactly sure if moving instances in Hubzilla would also port over all of the previous user data, but that would be super cool if they can do that, so I can move from one instance to another without loosing all of my old posts and replies.

Another thing I'd like to see in a decentralized social media is an additional p2p implementation which can be used to talk to users or other instances directly without first going through my own instance, this would essentially solve most of the censorship concerns because now you don't have to rely entirely on your instance to communicate. But there comes some issues like what if I like/share a post, for that I'll have to depend on my instance right?
So maybe fediverse isn't the best place to add p2p, it wasn't originally made for that. Some of you may know about the p2p social network scuttlebutt.nz/, this actually does a lot of those things I listed above, with an option to use servers if needed. Only issue I have with this is that it won't scale as well as the fediverse. Because in Scuttlebutt you have to store all the information on your device itself, if you just joined a server then you'll have to first sync and download all the content that's on the server to your phone, and this can take lots of storage space. This video addresses some of these concerns -
So IMO the sane way to do it would be to find a sweet spot between what Hubzilla does and what Scuttlebut does. You don't have to make the network entirely p2p and make everyone store everyone else's data, its OK to rely on federated servers as long as its easy to move from one to another and supports cloning like in Hubzilla. If Scuttlebut only needs storing my own posts, replies, and other data then I don't see any issue with that, because this data is probably needed to move between different clients or servers. But I think storing the data of everyone in the network is overkill, let the users store a local copy of their own data and also keep a backup of the same data in the server(s) of their choice.

By the way I want to mention that I really hate when admins block users/instances. They should only do that in extreme situations (like spam and bots). But I do understand that we need tools for this as well. Also you have to understand that if we do not have a better solution to this admins will continue to ban users/instances in a non-transparent way. Friendica at least publishes all such blocks publicly by default. But it needs to also send a notification to all users when a decision like this has happened.

So the discussion is very important. I see these adblock-like lists mostly geared for users and not admins.

So on Friendica whenever admins add domains to the blocklist, it becomes public at /friendica url. Admins are also forced to explain the reason of the block.

Now I have asked them to automatically add a notification to all users of that instance when a domain is added or removed from the list - github.com/friendica/friendica… . This is a move in the right direction.

Friendica is leading the way to a great social platform in so many regards, and the develops, @Michael Vogel @Hypolite Petovan and @Tobias are so friendly and open to suggestions. I hope this never changes because it is the most important aspect of Friendica. I really feel comfortable talking to these guys and suggesting improvements for Friendica, without (hopefully) overwhelming or annoying them.

@Tio @utzer ~Friendica~ @Michael Vogel @Amolith @Eugen @Hypolite Petovan @Snopyta @Hank G @Humane Tech Now @ar.al🌻 @Jeena @dansup @Cory Doctorow's linkblog @TBlock @xantulon @Informa Pirata @Cleo McKee

So the last time we talked about this topic I explained how most of these censorship issues could be avoided by using peer to peer systems. But now I wanna take a look at the fediverse itself and see how we can make things better. I have an idea that I want to share with you all, because I think it could solve a lot of issues with our current method of moderation. I felt like it was better to make a separate post for it so explained it here - social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc4…