The idea is to use human moderation flows as a feature to spread federation wider. Each flow has to first be created then is either trusted – ie they are going to keep posting good stuff or moderated that sometimes they post good stuff.
So the system only scales if human beings reach out to each other to build trust links. If everything stays on moderation then the workload soon becomes unmanageable or the site is overrun by irelevance or spam. In both cases the site sesses to be useful. This is a core feature of the network to push human scale federated trust communities.
The only way to get a useful site is to build a big healthy community (with wide groups of admins and moderators) or a small focus trust group based on quality choice of connections. Both are good outcomes, and what the #OMN is about building.
If we build in automation then we will have lots of middling quality sites that are borderline useful. A signal to noise issue. There will be less motivation to spesherlise and the network will likely fail because of this.
Less is more is a core of the project. The #geekproblem is the desire to improve the network with better tools
Spam and low quality posts have to find a way to flow into the network and when they are in they need to then flow to the quality parts of the network.
The problem we face is that there might not be any sites allowing new content in… so this will lead to the need to set up more outlying sites and spread the network wider and narrow the focus of these new sites to keep admin down, spreading the network wider and narrowing the focus etc.
You see an organic growth of base sites narrow/local/subject to middle sites regional/topic to top sites outreach/mainstreaming.
The bottom sites feedup to the top sites both by quality tags subject feeds and aggregation editorial articles. In both cases these directly link back to the bottom content sites.
The traditional value pyramid is reversed – the top sites are easey to setup and admin but hard to add value to. The middle sites are the core of the project sifting and adding value vier aggregation. All the true value lies at the base were the publishing happens