There should be a Fediverse platform that makes blocking entire topics as easy as blocking a tag, not subscribing/unsubscribing dozens of communities. Firefish (antennas) and PieFed let you follow/block keywords, but that’s not the same as robust, community-wide topic blocking. Imagine collaborative, booru-style tagging across posts so blocking a tag reliably removes all content using it. Does anyone know of software that already provides topic-level blocking out of the box without needing long manual lists?
I don’t feel something like crowdsourced tagging would work for the Fediverse unless it has some sort of approval system built for either post’s author or commuity admins (and those are already busy). Otherwise it would be far too easy to do things like brigading, or pushing government-style “self-censorship” (or straight out censorship of others: just get an army of
bots“volunteers” into one instance, let the resulting blocks federate). Something closer to AO3 style tagging, where the author retains most control but readers can add tags to things that are valid only to them (and maybe to people they share data with too?) should workbetter IMO.Blocking keywords is not reliable to block topics because a keyword does not a topic make, for example in this post I mention queer, socialism, musk and islam yet it’s not topical to any of those things.
I think moderating tags is the same as moderating any other content. If there’s a brigade, you can revert all tag changes made by the brigading users the same way you remove content posted by a user when banning them. That said, the moderation system could be improved. Reddit-style moderation is one of the biggest jokes on the internet.