Diaspora Foundation: A Child-Porn Sharing Network

"Highly illegal stuff" is relative, in time.and space.

How do you suggest we enforce that?

I've been thinking a lot about moderating with online communications, decentralized and federated makes the solutions even more complex. It's not easy to filter when the people you want to filter have some tech knowledge. I've been dealing with that for years. One bad person in a country near this one has access to thousands of VPNs, and is simply unstoppable.

I've been kicking around the idea of having multiple filter options for each server and each user.

I am very interested in how others would tackle this. Particularly interested in blocking / filter options with matrix and similar systems.

I am imagining a block servers list, block cidr list, and a set of human moderators that can 'add on the fly' to a list they control - these lists being set to block by default. With options to whitelist individual users or ips on a server basis and per user basis.

I'd like to give each user an option to turn off these filters all at once, or whitelist different servers for example.

I also want to have a page showing for example, a blocklist of servers, and a blocklist of users, and a list of the moderators, like a list of nightclub 'bouncers' - so that people can make comments about them - if one bouncer does block lots of bad things, but also blocked a few people who had differing politics for example, it would be nice to have a way to see and discuss that and give people options to have a different bouncer blocking their message box.

There's some of my random thoughts on the issue, I'd like to see what others have come up with. When exploring rocket chat and similar, what I have seen so far is that these comm platforms are working with teams of non hostile users in mind and defending against the kind of issues initially described here is not really something any portal is prepared to handle well. Yet, hopefully. I have been asking about different mod tools and how to implement multiple layers for the various threats / issues.

I also think sometimes people in a group need to be set to not see new users to the group by default, and only after a certain amount of time can a newer user be seen by the main others in a group - things like that.

You used a headline grabbing/clickbait title such as Diaspora Foundation: A Child Porn Sharing Neywork, in order to draw attention to a lack of a federated moderation system in the Diaspora network system.

In my view this alone would be a good reason for you to be banned and cast out from those groups. FWIW I am not involved in those groups and I don't even know what happens in them, but the fact that you used such a title to draw attention to your cause shows that you have a cause which is not compatible with their ethos and other such decentralized systems.

Decentralized networks have arisen in response to centralized and privately controlled services like Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Paypal and Patreon which use they term hate speech, neo-nazi, populist as excuses to ban those whose political and social views they disagree with, and you seriously expect them to adopt some sort of centralized control system. Good luck to you.

The same can be said of the TOR network, which seems to have become a system abused by all kinds of shady operators, with child pornography networks, bitcoin extortionists, Islamist propaganda networks among those operating behind the anonymity it offers.. Are there any calls for some kind OPTIONAL federated moderation systems for the TOR network?

How about Cloudflare, which has also come under criticism for protecting shady actors?

As for the child porn issue, the Internet itself can be seen as a child porn network irrespective of what tools or services are used to access it, and the same can be said about its so called relationship with hate speech. As Jordan Peterson asks, who defines what hate speech is?

As for the OPTIONAL part, things which are optional eventually morph into mandatory systems, with the possibility of operators who don't subscribe to such services being blocked simply for not using it..

Take a look at an organization such as Spamhaus, a supposedly optional but privately owned and controlled service, all the criticism and complaints of their abuse and misuse of a power over the years, and ask yourself why an organization committed to decentralized communication woud want such as system at the core of the services it provides.

I say this again, good luck to you!!

I spent about a month or so tinkering with Diaspora and I feel your pain. Wherever free speech is paramount, it comes at a price. Some people feel that free speech and free "expression" shouldn't be free. I have rarely circled back to my Diaspora account since discovering similar disturbing images/messages.

If it's helpful to you, there are many other decentralized networks. So far as I can tell, Mastodon has better moderation controls that can block entire instances. It doesn't stop bad things from happening. The only confort I can gleam from that is that those who do/say terrible stuff do so at the risk of being seen and discovered.

"Spamming" issue tickets? You mean leaving comments? "Spam" is an unsolicited advertisement for a product or service, I DEFINITELY did not do that, so I think you should be more precise with your language. They don't have a Terms of Service that says you are not allowed to make comments on issue tickets, so I did not violate any terms of service. IMHO "spamming" is the excuse that all censors use, when they censor you.