I would say it’s closer to filters are something to curate what you see, and moderation is to curate the community.

That’s the traditional definition, sure. Traditional moderation essentially forces others to not see certain content based on the moderator’s opinion, and that’s incompatible with a properly P2P application where there is no central authority.

Perhaps here’s a more satisfactory definition:

• filter - data is stored, but not shown
• moderation - data is not stored (or stored separately)

So an individual client wouldn’t have the CP, gore, etc content for a given community because it has been moderated out. However, another user with different moderation settings might still have that content on their machine. If most people in the network remove the content, then the content is effectively gone since it won’t be shared, but there’s no guarantee that nobody has that content. Content nobody sees value in will disappear, since things are only kept when someone wants it.

Make sense? The only exception here is for that moderation queue, so you might have that content depending on your settings, but it wouldn’t be shared with others (client feature).

I strongly agree that purely centralized moderation is bad, but some level of centralization of moderation is beneficial.

Perhaps. I just have trouble figuring out how to decide who the moderators are in a way that doesn’t lead to the problem of new users flooding a community and kicking out existing users, so elections are out. There are no admins to step in to mediate disputes or recover from a hostile takeover.

So my solution leans on the users to generally prefer to not associate w/ scammers, spammers, pedophiles, etc, and that disassociation would help them benefit from the moderation efforts of their peers that think similarly to them. However, this also means that Nazis, pedophiles, etc can use the platform to find like-minded people. But the only people impacted by their nonsense should be those who believe similarly to them, since other users wouldn’t see their content.

So we’ll still end up with silos, but they’ll be silos that users choose. If they don’t like what they’re seeing, they have the tools to fix that. Hopefully this is good enough that most people will get what they want, and in a way with user-driven censorship instead of platform-driven censorship.

The nice thing about this setup is that we can add centralized moderation if we choose in the form of public filter lists. It would be completely opt-in, and clients could be tuned for that use-case. But because of its distributed nature, there’s no protection at the protocol level to prevent undesirable people from forking the client and removing those types of filters, in much the same way that Lemmy doesn’t prevent someone from ignoring all moderation.

I’m open to suggestions. I also don’t like the idea of Nazis and child abusers using my platform, but the distributed nature means nobody has any form of top-down control. Either we elect a moderator (which is subject to bots and whatnot), or we remove the concept of moderator entirely.

I think we’ll end up with accounts that people can trust completely, such as bots that identify CP, gore, extremism, etc, and then you can just explicitly add them to your trusted moderator list. And I’ll probably add something like that to the codebase once it’s created. But yeah, it’s a tricky problem to solve, and I’m trying to lean on reduced centralization when I have to make a choice.