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Hiya Ben,

Yes! I might add, though, that community standards don't need to be enacted entirely in the source code, although code could certainly help. I was in New York earlier this month talking with Cornell Tech folks (for example, Helen Nissenbaum, a philosopher) about exactly this thing: there are "handoffs" between human and technical mechanisms to support values in sociotechnical systems.

What makes federated social networking like Mastodon most of interest to me is that different smaller communities can interoperate while also maintaining their own community standards. Rather than every user having to maintain massive blocklists or trying alone to encourage better behavior in their social network, we can support admins and moderators, self-organize into the communities we prefer and have some investment in, and still basically talk with everyone we want to.

As I understand it, one place to have this design conversation is the Social Web Incubator Community Group (SocialCG), which you can find on W3C IRC (#social) and Github (but no mailing list!), and we talked about harassment challenges at a small face-to-face Social Web meeting at TPAC a few weeks back. Or I'm @npd@octodon.social; there is a special value (in a Kelty recursive publics kind of way) in using a communication system to discuss its subsequent design decisions. I think, as you note, that working on mitigations for harassment and abuse (whether it's dogpiling or fake news distribution) in the fediverse is an urgent and important need.

In a way, then, I guess I'm looking to the creation of new institutions, rather than their dismantling. Or, as cwebber put it:

While I agree that the outsize power of large social networking platforms can be harmful even as it seemed to disrupt old gatekeepers, I do want to create new institutions, institutions that reflect our values and involve widespread participation from often underserved groups. The utopia that "everything would be free" doesn't really work for autonomy, free expression and democracy, rather, we need to build the system we really want. We need institutions both in the sense of valued patterns of behavior and in the sense of community organizations.

If you're interested in helping or have suggestions of people that are, do let me know.
Cheers,
Nick

Some links:

• Social CG: https://www.w3.org/community/socialcg/ or maybe better: https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG
• their issue list, including some abuse or privacy topics: https://github.com/swicg/general/issues
• some previous thoughts on harassment mitigation for the Web: http://bcc.npdoty.name/Dealing-with-harassment-and-spam-on-the-Web