@kkarhan you know I literally work on technology for doing moderation, right? That's like my whole job.
But what you've linked to is just your form of a blocklist; I'm describing the social structures for managing such information & looking well beyond blocks.
@thisismissem In the federal system I live in, we sometimes have “alliances” of states for specific purposes—like the Western States Alliance, which (very usefully) unified covid policy across multiple US states. And I like the term in general—it seems less political-jargony and more accessible than coalition and bloc.
@thisismissem I’ll also note that it’s my preference never to coin new terms except as a last resort or the proper name of a product/tool/etc.
(I think my position is a little counter to existing fedi culture, probably because I’m an editor before everything else. All language is imperfect, so no term will ever be exactly right! But I’ve come to believe that in general, the plainer the language, the more accessible the information behind it becomes.)
As many others have already said … I vote neither (though I did vote Alliance) … the ideal would be something more neutral while connoting something warm, protecting, nerdy and informal, and ideally, unique to the Fedi somehow.
@thisismissem I could be wrong, but I think alliance can and should prevail here. “Coalitions” tend to often most be temporary political alliances for purposes of gaining or applying power. They are rarely expected to last very long. (There are exceptions to anything.)
@wigbert re read the question: specifically about moderation & community standards. e.g., a group of servers working together on OSINT for bad actors on the fediverse, or a group of servers working together under common rules and moderating out content, or a group of servers working together to combat spam.
The servers are already part of a "federation” which is the Fediverse, but there'd need to be a word for describing the groups organising to build the networks that they want.
@thisismissem i have always favored "a crash of servers" and suppose "a murder " would raise too many eyebrows but maybe "pod" is just right (like a pod of whales).
@thisismissem you are of course right. I guess it depends on the level of legal/formal structure you are envisioning. I like animal collective nouns in situations where it is a voluntary, non-punitive, self-organising collaboration rather than an organization with a charter and administrators or leaders. If that is what you have in mind then your terms are fit better, with the exception of bloc which to me has a self-organizing and militant denotation (to me). Naming is hard! :)
@infrathin well, at minimum, you'd probably have a privacy policy, an appeals policy, etc. i.e., the goal is to formalise how the group works together.
@thisismissem OTOH I think "bloc" would be my fourth pick, mainly because it sounds like "block" and we're already talking about moderation, so it could be confusing.
@thisismissem What I imagine as a model for that is intergovernmental organizations. Like the UN or EU as some really well known examples. Where the charters are for cooperation and coordination (as opposed to like, mutually delegating legal authority, or funding, or reciprocal defense), then words like union, council, assembly, and league seem to come up a lot.
@thisismissem technically that’s a formal structure. But it may in fact be helpful in some cases for orgs to have formal structures like membership shares in a co-op.
I don’t actually think that’s going to happen other than in niche areas but it very much depends on the Fediverse server model.
A services org that specializes in hosting?
Are there moderation as a service entities?
There are a handful of co-ops that specialize in eg Wordpress or Drupal hosting and that’s about it.
@boris So, I think @thisismissem is looking more for a group of otherwise independent decision-making entities. On the fediverse, the typical mapping is 1 server = 1 locus of control; #CoSocial and a few others are exceptions there, although that will probably change. That said, I know that the cooperative model is used in other ways than how we do it; like for independent farms that collaborate to sell milk, for example.
@thisismissem group? May be those group will name themselves and in couple of years we'll have Alliance, Horde, Federation, Union, Hierarchy, Collective and Space.
The idea is that in the near future or even present day of the Fediverse, we'll see groups of servers, moderators, and communities working together to define the boundaries that they want & accept.
e.g., FediPact could be considered a "bloc" of server's who all agree not to federate with Meta, that'd be an example of such.
You could maybe also consider the Mastodon Server Covenant as being a "bloc" of servers
e.g., they could publish a federation "accept list" of all the servers that have agreed to it, and have a process for appeals or challenges, and then you could subscribe to that and only accept instances that agree with the covenant's terms.
For me, "coalition" felt a little weird because it implies to me a political power, where as I'd say "bloc" invokes trading power which is perhaps closer to what we're doing: trading Activity's between different ActivityPub servers. "union" could work too.
@thisismissem
I think running a server is political power: we are basically like the despots of little virtual nations of people. We make these sort of diplomatic decisions with each other, across boundaries, and while people can move between servers if they have an issue with how the one they're on is being governed, larger servers still have an advantage in that a block of or from us can cut smaller servers off from thousands of people.
We form coalitions, like FediPact, TBS, etc, when we have a larger goal that we want to achieve and a general methodology of how we want to achieve it. The biggest example might be FediBlock. Not everyone has to agree with those coalitions, not every coalition is going to be good, but I think that's a good word for it.
That said, I would really like for us to talk more between servers, as staff. I feel like that should be a bigger part of our culture, perhaps even built into the software itself.
@thisismissem
It would also be good, as a simpler fix, for me as a moderator to be able to mark a report to send my actual account name, so the staff of the other server can see it and PM me about it.
@thisismissem
Hence why it'd be for staff-only. Then again, wouldn't a warning like "only do this if you trust the other server" suffice? I will note, TechHub blocks any server we don't trust the staff of not to behave this for...
@Raccoon I think I'd probably rather have this directly in the admin tools, rather than directing administration or moderation conversations to private individual's mentions or DMs, where there's far less accountability from their co-admins or co-moderators.
@thisismissem I voted coalition. My gut says Alliance feels more general while coalition feels more specific and action oriented? Collective moderation feels action oriented to me? Looking up the definitions they all reference each other so it seems it's all vibes.
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