Here are some potential ideas which might help:

1: A pod-related manifesto or TOS which can be modified by the podmin to hold legal and ideological disclaimers and is visible quickly and on request to users when they sign up and after.

2: A "report" user feature (the grumpy button) which reports a post/user to the podmin.

3: User "reputation", be it public or private which can be transfered between pods. A tag/score system comes to mind.

4: A sharable ignore list for users.

5: A diaspora manifesto/disclaimer on the wiki which offers immediate insight for people running amok trying to get user XY banned.

Ideally the feature should work in a way that

A: a disgruntled user gets the sense that he is potentially heard,

B: the podmin has a chance to act, with enough information

C: the user being reported is notified (without showing him the reporter) so he knows what's up and can take measures if everything was just a misunderstanding.

D: and all that in a way that the podmin can not later be legally nailed down on the fact that he knew about it.

Quite a challenge... did I mention I am willing to code this if this discussion gets lively enough and turns into enough of a roughdraft?

A few thoughts:

1. We had an idea a while back about implementing a sort of drop-in "Terms of Service", in which a podmin could update the TOS, and everyone would be notified of a new TOS to agree to the next time they refreshed the stream or something.

You could just have a boolean field to check whether or not a user has accepted the new TOS, and this field simply gets reset every time a new TOS comes up.

1. I think a system for reporting users is fundamentally important when it's on community hosting. There could be some kind of function in which you flag a user, add a comment on why you're flagging them, and a notification of some sort goes to the podmin.

2. User reputation may be a bit of a sticky subject. Some users will say things that are unpopular, but the problem is, those scores can be manipulated simply by communicating with like-minded people. If you see a Neo-Nazi posting, sure, you could give him some negative feedback, but he could just as easily offset it with popular feedback from his Neo-Nazi friends. Besides which, we're not Klout.

I agree that a public reputation system is kind of a nono since it creates competition and data-trash. However, it would help podmins to know how often a certain user has received negative attention and when in order to make an educated decision.

legally, it might be the best idea to have a way to forward any posts in question (a version of share?) to pod storage file where they could (or, at least it could be said they could) be reviewed. how this is best done, UI-wise, might well determine how spammy and trashy it becomes--that is to say, there should be adequate hurdles for the 'hate speech reporter' in place, so that reporting on a whim is kept to a minimum, and is well documented (a pop-up with a list of questions to be answered tends to take the fun out of it).

Has anyone ever tried a "private reputation system"? That is, you can give people karma and up/down vote posts, but none of that data is visible to the end user. It would certainly be an interesting experiment...to see how people change their ideas, beliefs and especially how they say things when they are criticized or praised by their peers.

However, I don't necessarily believe this whole idea is a good thing. If you don't like the way someone is behaving on your pod, you as a podmin have the right to revoke his/her account. If you're a user, you can just not follow that person or perhaps block them. I don't see why we need a censorship system in any way on a distributed social network.