Is the idea that every jurisdiction runs its own instance of this software?

That is possible, yes. And an instance can follow the rulings of more than one court (the union of all verdicts would apply).

There’s also the question of representation.

Fair representation by election is an issue where I have to read some papers about before specifying the details of this system.

Sure, but are there checks and balances which ensure that?

• Elections where a fixed part of current judges is replaced every x months
• Removal of a judge if x% of fedis MAU or y% of instance admins vote on a distrust

That would be my current ideas. But keep in mind that I’m a software engineer, not someone who studied politics.

As the mods of other instances are all volunteers and might already be overworked I don’t support this idea. But as someone else mentioned following the actions of other instances and only automatically applying these actions if x% other instanced did the same might be a good idea.

A tribunal is not the fastest solution; true and that is a problem. But on the other hand following the verdicts of just one entity (a list, an instance, a person) brings the risk of abuse of power by that entity where a jury is democratic.
I don’t want to defend my idea as the right approach, as it has pros and cons and I don’t know what the optimal solution should be myself.

The difference between blocking and purging is that a blocked account is still residing on the instance (even more so for user blocks instead of admin blocks). As the data is still there, it opens possibility for legal trouble. Full purges by instance moderation action is different.

The scope of my proposal is not to help curate and filtering content for instances, but to enable widespread coordinated action against content which was already created and is harmful without any room for interpretation.

approach could be any IP

That is a whole other issue. Scrapers and request spammers, not content spamming accounts, can be combated with already existing technology at the reverse proxy server. There are big crowdsourced IP banlists which are continuously updated.

I think subscribable block-lists for instance admins

This would be the easiest solution. But I think it will lead away from individualism of instances, as all decisions are automatically applied, instead of only a manually reviewed subset.
Your idea with applying the mod action after a threshold of other instances did it too is something to consider. It will keep individualism but also creates “avalanches” once enough instances in the network agreed on a decision, which might be even better for propagating swift action against general harmful content.

The posts certainly do get duplicated to every instance, of course, but the media contained in them are always hosted by the originating instance, as far as I can tell.

Some software creates thumbnails on the server storage.

I wonder how you would handle the different sizes of instances.

That is a problem to discuss after it is decided if the Fediverse even wants such a service ;)
But I’m aware and one possibility would be to limit the number of electable judges from one instance. The upper limit must be in proportion to their user-count to be somewhat representing. But I think instances with only a handful of users won’t ever get seats without the jury being way too big. Or they are so popular that they get enough votes from other instance users.

It’d be difficult to come up with a central solution which isn’t some lowest common denominator. Which probably will be overblocking in this case?

It should be lowest common denominator with underblocking; so the intersection of rules, not the union. If one needs more strict blocking, nobody stops them. The court is not supposed to replace instance local moderation, just to augment it to allow more swift central decisions on certain topics.

Also the implementation can allow following more than one court. So for example once for international internet law (really lowest common denominator) and one for German internet law.

My idea is to limit the scope of the rulings to be limited to very basic laws (like preventing illegal material). Everything outside this scope is still the sole matter of the individual instances. It is like the International Court of Justice, only to judge based on common rules, while not interfering with “local politics” (while it can be used to get consent of all participating instances for other procedures).

When it is visible that judges use their position to apply rules of their home instance to everyone else, they should be voted out.

Don’t put it on top, but make it part of the platform itself.

Then we would need to convince every platform dev to implement it with a predefined standard and wait for the release. With the independent server + bot approach it gives more flexibility and every server admin can add the service without the platform to support it.

We could expose moderation decisions as some kind of feed people can subscribe to.

But then it would depend too much on the views of one instance. Every instance has their own set of rules, which is their right and is fine. But not all instances would like to apply the mod decisions based on rules they might not even have. With a common 3th-party jury mod actions are limited on only a set of rules all instances agree on, while they can apply more fine-grained rules themselves and not interfering with other servers.

But it’s also guaranteed to be (ab)used for the usual political, online ideology/identity war.

This is also a big problem with following mod actions of a server which also publishes posts. There will be a bias and if that server has beef with someone else, it will lead to injustice.

Also another thing about “feed people can subscribe to”: this proposed system is not for curated blocklists between users or such. It is for actions which have to apply to whole instances like account purges to ensure illegal media is not distributed.

FYI sending a code for login seems not to work for fedia.io. Login via code in my profile works.

but it’s kindve the odd child out here

sad Mbin dev noises (or maybe odd as in special, then happy Mbin dev noises)

Very cool. I was looking forward to something like this coming into existence or else I might have done it (probably with worse UI/UX than you did :D ).

And I’m glad to see that Mbin is still included in the list of major threadiverse platforms.