D-colmeia: extensão de moderação distribuída e colaborativa para o ActivityPub

Abstract

Decentralized social networks have gained traction in recent years, driven by concerns over privacy, data control, and content moderation in centralized platforms. The ActivityPub protocol, which underpins the fediverse, enables federated communication between instances but presents challenges for collaborative and decentralized moderation. This work proposes a Distributed and Collaborative Moderation Extension for ActivityPub (D-COLMEIA), an extension to the ActivityPub protocol focused on distributed content moderation based on the Kademlia protocol. The solution establishes a decentralized model for collaborative moderation, using a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to store and retrieve moderation-related information while avoiding single points of failure. The proposed architecture enables different instances to participate in a distributed system, preserving local autonomy and applying concepts of collective intelligence and crowdsourcing to content moderation. An ontology is also introduced to represent moderation data, distributed among the network’s nodes. The approach is validated through a functional prototype tested in a controlled environment.