@FWAaron 100% this.

Moderation is a huge problem. People join instances and just trust the moderation. When I first came to Mastodon I joined an instance after asking some questions of the admin about how it was run. I then became a moderator and that's when it all fell apart. No one was moderating the moderators. Suffice it to say incredibly questionable things were going on and the users were oblivious.Those things had a huge effect on the instance and were invisible.

@Lynnkelly

So with corporate social media, like X/Twitter, Facebook etc, moderation is handled by these corporations and that is widely disliked. They do too much, not enough, are inconsistent etc. And a lot of power lies in that moderation falling in them.

Mastodon is better because moderation is decentralized to servers. The assumption in how ActivityPub, the protocol underlying Mastodon, was made, was that by decentralizing governance and moderation, and giving people the ability to move accounts between servers, moderation and governance of servers will work well. It certainly is better that either Twitter or Facebook, but decentralizing power doesn't necessarily eliminate problems, and there are some flaws in how decentralization works in Mastodon.

For one, you're supposed to be able to move your account to another server, thus if you don't like your server for any reason including how it is moderated, you can theoretically move.

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@Lynnkelly
So that ought to encourage good moderation, and matching users to servers that share the same ideas about moderation. But moving your account only moves your followers and following and some other account data but not post history.

Also, signing up for Mastodon is harder than signing up for a single central service. That has tended to lead to some larger servers. Decentralization is helpful the more decentralized things are, because again, I'm thinking about power. Moderation is power.

Large server's moderation choices can have a disproportionate effect. If they block someone, that user loses a more significant share of potential viewers than if a smaller server does. And, moderating a larger server is just more work too, and who does all that? With what resources? What if it doesn't get done?

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@Lynnkelly
So, some of that stuff is touched on in the article I linked, and these are some of the thoughts that were swirling around in my head when I thought hmm, maybe I should see if there's a democratically run server somewhere, and maybe one that requires reasonable contributions from all users. So that's why I joined my server, social.coop.

Everyone contributes to the cost of running it. Day to day operations like moderation are done by the folks who step up to do it but setting and changing policies is discussed and voted on using some neat tools we have for online democratic decision making.

It's not perfect. There are many users and relatively few actively engaged in the decision making stuff, which for anyone who has ever been a part of a democratic member organization will sound familiar. Also, this does not overcome thise issues I mentioned and others that are just due to imperfections in the ActivityPub protocol.

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