@evan I agree that you should be able to see content you want, and don't see content you don't want. Nobody should have a say in that except the user. It's more of a network culture issue though. That content isn't generally liked by people on the Fediverse, so you should expect large parts of the network not being happy about that content arriving here. Same with the more "corporate" content, but even worse. Hetzner despite hosting a good chunk of the Fediverse wasn't welcomed well last year, when they joined some Mastodon server. And you probably already familiar with the pushback caused by Meta/Facebook/Threads joining the network and the secret NDAd meeting that happened before it joined.
This who should have the say though can be expanded even more. Both accounts you tagged are on
mastodon.social, but neither of them will actually see any of my posts, because some random moderator I never talked to decided to deactivate my remote account there. Why should a random person I never talked be able to decide who sees my posts and who I can follow on
mastodon.social. To be clear, I'm not advocating for some absolutely moderation-less network, but it is a valid extension of that logic. Which brings me to IFTAS.
IFTAS is specifically the centralized moderation thing I talked about regarding SWF. They are a non-profit ran by at least in the past very opionated people (one of which being the Nexus of Privacy author jdp23; their current members aren't listed I think). They run an auto-defederation tool whose sources aren't publicly published anywhere I could find and the actual full lists isn't publicly published anywhere either. Only the "DNI" one is, which as I understand is a small chunk of the full one. They require you to sign in with an admin account of your instance, to their portal in order to manage the tool and even figure out what the list is. Being this non-transparent on a decentralized open network should raise eyebrows of most people. Which is why I'm not hesitant to call them centralized moderation.
I oppose any kind of this "moderation" where biases are high and transparency is nil. That includes IFTAS and all other lists. Moderation should be done on a case-by-case basis, by the administrators/moderators of an instance and not by trusting a random 3rd party with zero transparency to do it for you. If it should exist, I don't think it should, then it should at least be completely decentralized, but all attempts at that failed. Look how fediblock turned out and when someone from the Mastodon side wanted to make an alternative, where admins/moderators could add ratings to other instances in an attempt to build a more reputable list compared to Oliphant's one, GardenFence, Seirdy's one or even IFTAS, they got harassed by various groups of these listed blocklists to the point of abandoning the attempt and going away from Fedi for at least some time. I forgot what the project was called, sorry, otherwise I would at least link it. Any reasonable attempt has so far turned into a witch hunt, where I can almost guarantee that one of the biggest sources of stress for Fediverse administrators isn't running the instance, but fearing of being featured on something like fediblock, where witch hunts are everywhere and reasonable moderation decisions nowhere to be found.
As to when SWF talked about moderation, here are a few posts. The linked blog posts are mostly sound, though. It's the IFTAS part I don't like at all.
https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/03/27/defederation-on-the-fediverse/https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/01/12/content-policy-on-the-social-web/The sustainability part minus moderation is an easy one to solve. There should be more instances, preferably less Mastodon ones, so that costs aren't as high and moderation spreads out more.
mastodon.social having over 300K users is the worst thing that could have happened.
Also please don't untag
@silverpill unless he specifically requests to do so. I want a healthy discussion about valid concerns and not a half-split thread.
