title: Possible routes for distributed anti-abuse systems date: 2017-04-04 18:00 author: Christine Lemmer-Webber tags: federation, anti-abuse slug: possible-distributed-anti-abuse ---

I work on federated standards and systems, particularly ActivityPub. Of course, if you work on this stuff, every now and then the question of "how do you deal with abuse?" very rightly comes up. Most recently Mastodon has gotten some attention, which is great! But of course, people are raising the question, can federation systems really protect people from abuse? (It's not the first time to come up either; at LibrePlanet in 2015 a number of us held a "social justice for federated free software systems" dinner and were discussing things then.) It's an important question to ask, and I'm afraid the answer is, "not reliably yet". But in this blogpost I hope to show that there may be some hope for the future.

A few things I think you want out of such a system:

Of course, keep in mind that no technology system is going to be perfect; these are all imperfect tools for mitigation. But what technical decisions you make do also affect who is empowered in a system, so it's also still important to work on these, though none of them are panaceas.

With those core bits down, what strategies are available? There are a few I've been paying close attention to (keep in mind that I am an expert in zero of these routes at present):

Okay, well that's it I think! Those are all the routes I've been thinking about. None of these routes are proven, but I hope that gives some evidence that there are avenues worth exploring... and that there is likely hope for the federated web to protect people... and maybe we could even do it better for the silos. After all, if we could do filtering as well as the big orgs, even if it were just at or nearly at the same level (which isn't as good as I'd like), that's already a win: it would mean we could protect people, and also preserve the autonomy of marginalized groups... who aren't very likely to be well protected by centralized regimes if push really does come to shove.

I hope that inspires some people! If you have other routes that should be added to this list or you're exploring or would like to explore one of these directions, please contact me. Once the W3C Social Working Group wraps up, I'm to be co-chair of the following Social Community Group, and this is something we want to explore there.

Update: I'm happy to see that the Matrix folks also see this as "the single biggest existential threat" and "a problem that the whole decentralised web community has in common"... apparently they already have been looking at the Stellar approach. More from their FOSDEM talk slides. I agree that this is a problem facing the whole decentralized web, and I'm glad / hopeful that there's interest in working together. Now's a good time to be implementing and experimenting!