I think your ideas are good. Vetting definately needs some workshopping as you say, I like the trust based karma, I think several kinds of karma could be useful, including operational karma as below, but trust karma for sure as well.

As to the karma and jury trials and censors and elected officials, it could be unions of instances pool ingtogether for jury pools and sharing censors, which I think is a real key evolution of federated social media, with the changes coming from llm’s and chatbots, the US government alone is making armies of them, worked by contractors no doubt.

Having an internet that isn’t dead, a place to talk, and a place with a fair set of rules that are enforced in a way you can be sure to get a fair hearing in if challenged, would at some point help federated social media get the exodus from silicon valley social media as the administration, and other countries all take illiberal turns and subjugate it.

What is needed more than anything, is a new social media, federated interoperable with existing fediverses like lemmy, whereby innumerable instances can organize on a general forum(s) on issues they agree on, and work publicly and privately as they see fit to work towards common goals. Be it groups agreeing to do or not do something if a politicians does or doesn’t do something. Or to find and groom political candidates. To crowdsource information on companies that cheat people, to set up stings for instance to companies that wage theft their employees, set up workers to go in and record them doing it, crowdsource investigation, and then use the group to push for consequences, all in secret as to the organization. That would be one type of karma, karma from actually doing something, for contributing to a mission.

That karma could then be used like currency to get people to help you with your pet project for instance. But the groups could do investigations like bellingcat, for instance the Epstein victims that want justice and are denied it, we can organize non public groups to coordinate with them, with proper operational security, and we’ve plenty of people on here to help us do that proper, which they would get say Operational Karma for, and the group could run down leads, investigate, could commission hackers to earn operational karma in finding documents, what have you, find witnesses and get their statements, run down their leads, organize a timeline, etc. Then we could try to use that information, people able to use it that gets play get their own operational karma for it.

Those are just two small examples, but this could be a big force, if set up decentralized where innumerable instances can pop up whack a mole if shut down, on a new general forum endlessly, with opsec for when it’s needed, for when it does threaten monied interests and attract the ire of authorities. It would come in handy for the election too, to have groups to crowdsouce what we know, what is going on, a place to securely share with trusted communities private or public information we’ve come into the possession of, to decide what and when to share with journalists. To be able to work to get articles into publication when it’s needed, social media posts, etc.

For instance private groups set up to catch Republicans cheating at voting machine level. They got the inner workings, the hard drives of all the voting machines after 2020 from Lindell’s website and operation he set up. They illegally got their hands on like all swing state voting machine software, and probably all the red states, maybe all states by now. AZ, MI, GA, WI, PA I think. To set up ways to catch them at it. There are a lot of possibilities.

But things removed from politics too, all encompassing, crowdsourcing new and better ways of doing things, new inventions, people could get the help and resources to run down their ideas if they can entice others to join in, they can allocate credit to each other, and get a cut of any future proceeds from it, the site would get a cut, and it could be made and sold as a benefit corporation, not to maximize profit, but to provide a needed product or service at a good cost in an area the private sector hasn’t met the needs of society, while providing a reasonable rate of return and equity for those that invested in it. It could work better than all profit, and fulfill the role government refuses to regulate business into providing or providing themselves.

Then Consumers Unions. To pressure companies to make better products, make demands on manufacturers, not buy products if they don’t change their behavior.

Anyway, so there is the political angle, of public and private groups federated to cooperate on what they agree on; there is an investigative angle with operational karma; there is an investors/inventors type of union to provide businesses to fulfill a role the private sector and government refuses to provide by operating not only on the profit motive; and consumers unions.

If done with the right system that has the trust of people, and is resistant to government and big business fuckery, nimble in reincarnation should any part get shut down, with operational security sooner than later, it could remake society. The best time to do this was 20 years ago, but the next best time is now.