I’m always concerned with these kinds of systems and how minorities would be treated within them. Plenty of anti trans stuff gets upvoted by non trans people from a number of other instances, both on and off trans instances. Any such system would favor the most popular opinions, disallowing anything else, at least from how I interpret them when they are explained to me.
There’s also the issue that mods would still have to be a thing and they would need to be able to both ban and remove spam and unacceptable content, so how do you make sure these features aren’t also used to just do moderation the old fashioned way?
And how do trusted users work in a federated system? Are users trusted on one server trusted on another? If so that makes things worse for minorities again and allows for abusive brigading. Are users only trusted on their home instance? If so that’s better, but minorities are still at a disadvantage outside of their own instances.
There’s also the issue with scale. Piefed/lemmy isn’t large. What is the threshold to remove something? What happens when there’s few reports on a racist post? How long does it get to stay up before enough time passes for it to accrue enough reports? Any such system would need to be scaled individually and automatically to the activity level of each community, which might be an issue in small comms. There are cases where non-marginalized people struggle to understand when something is marginalizing, so they defend it as free speech. What happens in these cases? Will there be enough minorities to remove it? I doubt it.
I’m sure there is some way to make some form of self-moderation, but it would need to be well thought out.
I hate them so very much
Edit: as in I hate the bbc for using this language