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Comment by nightpool | Hacker News Reader

The other issue is that I fundamentally don't think the problems of moderation and hosting are "separable" as the paper claims—the moderation of your content is intrinsic to the question of "who wants to be responsible for hosting and paying for this content?". And people are going to want to use moderation systems that make moderation decisions they agree with and support—they're not going to want to be paying for a hosting provider that hosts content they disagree with. That's why I see the fediverse "plurality of networks" federated model winning out in the end, because it can be funded and operated by small groups of people interoperating with each other rather then requiring large centralized directory resources that nobody wants to pay for.

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I thought it was cheaper not to look at the content, than to look at it. That just leaves legal responsibility as an issue.

That requires each and every user to do the moderation for themselves. Which few if any want. Most users actually want moderation, as long as they can decide whose ban list applies to the content they see.

Moderation is only an issue at "commercial" scale. Any small community can easily solve moderation. One critique I have about most modern business plans is that they are looking for large scale and little responsibility.

Nightpool has been an admin of AcitvityPub servers of all sizes for years now and is versed in the moderation challenges therein, I'm not sure they'd agree :) I'm not sure I agree that it's a solvable issue at community scale.

Yeah, I don't think moderation is "solved" at all on the community scale, but my point is that ActivityPub servers are just way more likely to be at that "community" scale, and Bluesky—as a more flat protocol with a lot of discovery and indexing features—is not. So I think they have a lot better chance of having communities that can reach a local moderation equilibrium.

I guess I'm looking at it from the Lens of the community. If a community can't solve its moderation issue through social standards the community degrades.

Once the community degrades to having no social standards there is no point in moderation.

I helped run a moderate a small forum community in the early aughts. We only had maybe 800-1000 active users at our peak. Moderation was fucking terrible, and not 'solved'. We had several users we elevated into moderator positions and still.. I think we were running about 1.5 moderators per 100 active users on average.

800 to a thousand sounds like a lot to me. The early aughts were also different times.

I think this comment is kind of correct, the moderation problem can be overlooked until the system scales(IMO not until individual participating instances scale but until the whole system becomes relevant), and thereafter we'd come back to the problem of bad actors and external pressures.

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