Comment by jazzyjackson
Comment by jazzyjackson 21 hours ago
Thanks for the patient explanation. It surprises me that an aggregator would simply start distributing from any server that announces it has content for that application. Moderation without false positives must be a beast.
The way I think about it, ingesting a stream of records from an arbitrary server is not any different to ingesting a series of <form> POST requests from someone’s computer. It doesn’t make moderation different.
Moderation in AT is layered. Hosting servers do their own moderation but it’s very minimal (just trying to catch illegal content early). Relay operators also have levers to stop broadcasting from specific nodes if they’re problematic (but again, this is reserved for either extreme illegal content or for network abuse). Most of what you’d think as moderation happens at the app server level, which is the same as in non-AT apps. The app server can easily choose to not serve a certain user’s posts even if they exist upstream at their hosting.
One wrinkle is that AT goes a step further and extracts moderation primitives (“labelers”) as a separate thing — for example, you can ingest Bluesky’s moderation decisions from a separate service (and the Bluesky app server listens to the same service). This makes moderation composable, and also lets someone make a fork of Bluesky that “listens” to a different moderation authority.