I spent some time thinking of a democratic process for moderation using #activitypub vocabulary. The flow works as:
1/ User(s) reports an user / item
2/ Moderators can initiate a "moderation court" which consists of
3/ A Question activity with details about the transgression and `oneOf` answers for the action to be taken (eg: ban vs. not ban vs. something else)
4/ Community discusses/votes on the Question
5/ Moderators effect what the community decided
The steps can be configured in different ways.
As an example: any user will be allowed to initiate the "mod court" not just moderators.
Also (at least on brutalinks) the moderation operation (ban user, edit post, edit submission, delete submission) can be allowed for a user's parent (brutalinks supports users inviting other users on the website)
A fancy version of this would be that the moderator takes an action on the instance (edit, ban, delete, etc), but sending the Activity corresponding to it will only be done if the vote on the Question matches a "Yes" from the community.
@mariusor
Firstly, what is the motivation behind "democratic moderation" as you describe it? Specifically, why would you want "mod courts"? It may be obvious to you, but I want to think critically in the open to allows us to see its implications.
Also, expanding the ActivityStreams vocabulary might be a good idea, before rushing and trying to shove new semantics onto existing vocab. Just some thoughts.
@torresjrjr and finally the motivation for "why" use a democratized decision making for moderation actions is that moderation is a very ingrate part of building communities.
The people that do it have to sacrifice their time and mental health in dealing with shitty users and content. Then when they're making decisions, they have to deal with the drama of being too heavy handed, or strong enough, etc.
So I think moderation should be a distributed in a community as much as possible. 2/2
@torresjrjr activitypub is only a transport protocol. As it is the situation in the fediverse, almost all services have their own interpretations of various activities/objects.
Using a Question as a way to gather consensus about a decision is not "shoving new semantics" onto existing vocab. It's using it for exactly what it was designed for.
Making a decision based on that is a meat space action or a client action, not related to the spec in any way. 1/2