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Comment by ivanhoe | Hacker News Reader

What happens if/when Mastodon gets mainstream and gets plagued by all the same problems as twitter? It being the distributed platform there's a very little options to fight fake news, hate speech, bots, etc. on Internet-wide level. Is there any option other than users gravitating to servers hosted by like-minded people, creating a clear separation into social bubbles?

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AFAIK you can block individual users, entire servers, and servers can also block other bad rep servers. I think a federation of servers with open source software is better equipped to fight fake news and bots not in spite of but because of decentralized protocols and how solutions must involve democratic values by definition.

Admins share lists of extremist instances and block them. This strategy helps to not viralize hateful/illegal content.

I think social bubbles is sort of built-in to the fediverse concept. There's some hope that a decentralized moderation problem will be more tractable than a centralized-for-profit-company moderation problem.

Good moderation is labor (and likely forever will be) and Mastodon by its very nature has a lot higher moderators per consuming users ratio than Twitter ever had (even on messages originating on and "not leaving" Mastodon's biggest instances). (Just like if you are evaluating school districts you want a higher teachers per students ratio.)

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