Moderation and Censorship

Decentralized social cannot promise absolutist free speech on every client — it distributes moderation across layers. Protocols may allow immutable posts; clients filter what users see. Hubs can drop spam; governments can still pressure app stores. The question is who holds the lever at each layer and whether users can exit to another reader.

Client-level filtering is the practical norm: Warpcast, Hey, and others remove illegal content, spam, and harassment from default feeds while the underlying signed message may still exist for archival clients. Users curate block lists that travel imperfectly across apps — another portability gap builders are working to close.

Immutable posts complicate retractions: editing means new hashes, deleting means removing pins — not erasing chain history. Communities experiment with delegated moderators, stake-backed reporting, and AI classifiers with transparent rules. No design satisfies every culture's speech norms; decentralized social offers pluralism of clients rather than one global policy from a single trust and safety team.