Comment by jayd16

5 hours ago

Has any popular site tried an approach where you dynamically select your mods as more of a content filter than global moderation?

Most places can hide posts and block users at the user level, so why not select which mods can do that for you?

3 comments

jayd16

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cxr  34 minutes ago

Yes, this is the way. Moderator actions should just be another feed that you can subscribe to (or not). The same approach solves "the discovery problem" for an incarnation/subset of the fediverse that can be bootstrapped with static nodes. Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30862781>

On discovery: if Alice is subscribed to updates to Bob's profile, then she'll for sure see any posts he directs at her (unless her client is broken), though she may not see any messages by Bob's friend Carol, since Carol just signed up and started following Alice but whether or not Alice knows Carol, her client knows nothing about Carol's profile. Alice has two options: use a client that's configured to recursively pull in the feeds of friends-of-friends (up to a configurable depth N) so then it can surface the replies that she wouldn't otherwise see under the naive filter (alternative: Alice relies on her friend group (read: their clients) to do the equivalent on their end—automatically nudging her with a "metamessage" they spot someone within their circle who has mentioned Alice but who can be seen not to be in the list of profiles that Alice is following; or: Alice can subscribe to Fedibook's Fantastic Feedsource, which maintains a panoptic view of everyone's public profiles and will do the same sort of nudging—Alice's client doesn't know that Carol's profile even exists, let alone the fact that she posted a reply to Alice's message, but Fedibook knows about Carol's profile and sees that mention, and Alice has "friended" Fedibook, so there's a path for Fedibook to promulgate a metamessage to Alice and call her attention to it.

Once you have the notion of metamessages in the protocol, you can also use them for (a) curated timelines, i.e. recommendations of stuff from profiles that you're not following, and (b) moderation actions, i.e. recommendations of feed items that your client should ignore.

This also allows you to subscribe to multiple curation sources, so if both Fedibook and Fedibuzz want your usership/attention, then they can both let you "friend" them, and you (read: your client) can decide what to do with what they return to you.