Leaving the thankless task of moderation to free working volunteers entitles them to secrecy and unaccountability.
Moderation should be crowdsourced subscription service that pays at least minimum wage.
User should directly be able to choose which moderation mask they wish to wear and they should pay for it. If not in real money (because fees and regulations) then at least in some form of actually valuable, redeemable token to compensate moderator for their service.
The user should always have the final work on who and what they don't want to see. Which moderator they subscribe.
Moderation must be transparent, modmail must public.
Moderators should not feel entitled to secrecy or abuse of their position (as would be the case for free work)
There would not be systemic power to wield by the moderators as a class, against the user class or the owner class.
It should ould be possible for a moderator to override or cancel the actions of another moderator. And then it comes to the order of operations in your list of moderator subscriptions.
Lemmy communities should publish a default set of moderators, which the user can pick and choose. Moderators should be able to publish multiple "moderation masks" and you pick which you like the most. Example "everything minus spam" "everything minus spam and sex" "everything minus spam and religion" "everything minus spam, racism, kletophobia and Jeff Bezos" and so on
I don't think owners should have a say in the content of the discussion. That is something for users and moderators to decide. I have had enough of the "take my ball and go home" situations. Make the database an encrypted blob that cannot be inspected directly.
Alternatively, there is no reason for instances to exist anyway. All computer users have orders of magnitude more compute power to each run their own single user instance. On their five year old phone and even in the dishwasher.
Text is small. Being a hard drive owner would not grant leverage over the freedom of expression of others.
Lemmy is not distributed enough, there is still too much power concentrated in the hands of the owner class and the moderator class.
Users should be their own owners. Moderators will still be needed but they will only operate with the consent of each user to mask off the content they don't want to see.
I don't get to choose where the center of the internet is going to be. So it's important to nudge this platform, while it is in its transformative stage, to eliminate the flaws it currently has. At least to mitigate the problem of the past that we've seen in slashdot Digg and Reddit. It would be very frustrating to spend the next 10 years here and still endure problems of the old platforms
You want me to host a community on my phone but only some stranger is allowed to curate the content on it? I don't really understand this system you're describing.
Any lemmeyverse user, including you, would be allowed to emit an opinion regarding moderation actions that would be performed on it.
In the same way votes are currently emitted, moderation actions should be "emitted" and every user can decide to follow, or override or have any kind of rule to interpret those actions.
For instance, a rule could be, if 100 users have emitted "delete" then enact this action in my locally filtered view.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Lemmy had mod logs by default.
Defederation is the moderation mask you speak of. Beehaw, for example, has the tankie instance blocked.
I also don't find the distinction between owner and miderator useful. In the case of decentralized Lemmy instances with less than 1k users, a single owner may act as both moderator and owner.
Defederation is an incredible extreme. And it should be easily bypassed by the user's client. It should even be a meaningless action.
My moderation mask I mean a kind of moderation action log. Your client reads it and applies it as an overlay to hide stuff from your sight.
If a user's comment is marked as deleted by the moderator, and you're subscribed to that moderator mask. Then your client treats it as deleted.
You can go into they mask and see if you agree with the moderators decision. If you don't, then subscribe to other moderators.
The moderators become actors on your behalf that you can override if you don't mind waiting through the crap yourself.
You could be subscribed to hundreds of moderators, maybe every user on the fediverse. Your client might only act on a moderation action if say, at least 10 independent users took the same moderation action and established a consensus.