Also on my blog

I work on federated standards and systems, particularly ActivityPub. Of course, if you work on this stuff, every now and then the question of "how do you deal with abuse?" very rightly comes up. Most recently Mastadon has gotten some attention, which is great! But of course, people are raising the question, can federation systems really protect people from abuse? (It's not the first time to come up either; at LibrePlanet in 2015 a number of us held a "social justice for federated free software systems" dinner and were discussing things then.) It's an important question to ask, and I'm afraid the answer is, "not reliably yet". But in this blogpost I hope to show that there may be some hope for the future.

A few things I think you want out of such a system:

It should actually be decentralized. It's possible to run a mega-node that everyone screens their content against, but then what's the point?
The most important thing is for the system to prevent attackers from being able to deliver hateful content. An attack in a social system means getting your message across, so that's what we don't want to happen.
But who are we protecting, and against what? It's difficult to know, because even very progressive groups often don't anticipate who they need to protect; "social justice" groups of the past are often exclusionary against other groups until they find out they need to be otherwise (eg in each of these important social movements, some prominent members have had problems including other social justice groups: racist sufferagists, civil rights activists exclusionary against gay and lesbian groups, gay and lesbian groups exclusionary against transgender individuals...). The point is: if we haven't gotten it all right in the past, we might not get it all right in the present, so the most important thing is to allow communities to protect themselves from hate.

Of course, keep in mind that no technology system is going to be perfect; these are all mitigators. But what technical decisions you make do also affect who is empowered in a system, so it's also still important to work on these, though none of them are panaceas.

With those core bits down, what strategies are available? There are a few I've been paying close attention to (keep in mind that I am an expert in zero of these routes at present):

Okay, well that's it I think! Those are all the routes I've been thinking about. None of these routes are proven, but I hope that gives some evidence that there are avenues worth exploring... and that there is likely hope for the federated web to protect people... and maybe we could even do it better for the silos. After all, if we could do filtering as well as the big orgs, even if it were just at or nearly at the same level (which isn't as good as I'd like), that's already a win: it would mean we could protect people, and also preserve the autonomy of marginalized groups... who aren't very likely to be well protected by centralized regimes if push really does come to shove.

I hope that inspires some people! If you have other routes that should be added to this list or you're exploring or would like to explore one of these directions, please contact me. Once the W3C Social Working Group wraps up, I'm to be co-chair of the following Social Community Group, and this is something we want to explore there.