New Paradigms in Trust and Safety: Navigating Defederation on Decentralized Social Media Platforms | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

"the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace conducted a workshop with eighteen experts to explore governance challenges to defederation... on decentralized social media [which] offers new possibilities for online governance. Experts consider how it can be used responsibly, in a way that balances speech and safety".

A good example of how the discourse about decentralisation is for many people 100% about the Fediverse: the opening metaphor explores how could "a government acting in the best interests of its citizens wield this immense power to blow up the bridge" connecting it with another city - ie defederate another instance, "a moderation function that allows a server to cut off communication with another server entirely". It mentions Bluesky and composable moderation, while missing that Bluesky is not on the Fediverse so defederation is entirely besides the point with ATproto, which decomposes social media far more than ActivityPub, or that ATproto users can move around without losing their content.

While the ideas behind both look good in theory, in practice "Trust and safety in decentralized spaces can be challenging ... there are few tools available for volunteer-run servers to address harmful content in bulk... a significant burden on the time and resources of moderators ... easily overwhelmed".

Moreover, "Behavioral threats... are hard to detect because of the architecture of the decentralized space", where critically useful information "that is available to centralized social media... email addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, and click paths — is unavailable... threats spread out across multiple instances become harder to spot".

Defederation is on the other hand a very powerful tool, easily implemented. It "is best for handling spam originating from plainly malicious servers... useful for small, volunteer-run servers to reduce the burden of moderation... has also been used as a way to escalate personal disagreements", which is a polite way of saying that each instance mod can effectively be a small-scale dictator.

Not that it is always an easy decision - it "introduces trade-offs between speech and safety", and if overused can punish the innocent and undermine the network: "some targeted servers may be erroneously defederated from and would not be able to rejoin the network even after the problem has been resolved... once a server has been placed on a defederation list, there are few formal means for them to question that decision".

To follow up:

• "With the newLOLA standard, [fediverse users] may also be able to bring their content with them