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Sniffy4 t1_j2buxrm wrote

The thing is, once Mastodon reaches critical mass it will have harmful-content moderation challenges like every other platform, but no revenue base to fund handling it; it's all on the lone instance maintainers to do that work.

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saltyhasp t1_j2bw8w4 wrote

Nice thing about Mastodon is that a node can choose the moderation they want and boot anyone that is causing problems. The big platforms have to please everyone which pleases no one.

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Sniffy4 t1_j2cmflv wrote

Once you get to a certain scale it will be impossible for a single person to handle that task, especially if they are trying to do it on a part-time unpaid basis. A big social media company like FB employs large teams to handle moderation issues in all regions of the world and many different languages, as well as AI to detect problematic posts. It's a huge job.

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Zncon t1_j2d226q wrote

Consider that we're currently talking on a platform that also makes significant use of community work to keep things in check.

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reconrose t1_j2e5ikg wrote

Except it's centralized and requires a team of admins and paid people to moderate illegal / extremely unsavory content. AFAIK Mastodon instances have no where near the same resources.

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danielravennest t1_j2ekhhu wrote

I'm sure companies like Google and Microsoft will set up Mastodon instances, and provide support services. They will want to mine the user data.

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albui t1_j2d65pj wrote

I'm not very active on Reddit and I have no desire to moderate a subreddit so I'm not sure how it works on the various subreddits. Do some moderators here get paid?

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reconrose t1_j2e5mrt wrote

No but there are admins and a whole team of people who respond to reports of site-wide rule breaking.

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albui t1_j2eax13 wrote

I may not understand the actual details of the decentralized nature of the fediverse but I was under the impression that each instance benefits from the moderation of other instances. So that any individual user or instance that is blocked by one instance is flagged so that other instances can decide what to do with this information.

There is no need for a single large team to do all this work because there isn't a single monolithic service that needs to cater for all users.

I'm probably living in a fantasy world but I still have reservations about putting all my trust in one commercial entity.

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