I’m running a handful of small Discord instances and I’m dreading the day when I’ll have to start messing with moderation bots to prevent spam and other malicious behavior.
Most of Discord’s moderation shortcomings could be solved by Trust Levels, which are still hugely underutilized in community software.
Networked (federated) trust levels shared across multiple inter-operating instances enables two important features:
Network of Trust
A user who has attained TL 2 on Meta should get bumped straight to TL1 when joining any forum that has listed meta.discourse.org as a Trusted Forum. Essentially the next step after Let experienced users skip "new to Discourse" features.
It’s a very straight forward PageRank-like system.
Discoverability
Discord has this handy feature that lets you see which chat communities (servers) you and another user have in common:
This reminded me of what I still think is the most appealing use case for our elusive Discourse Hub:
A similar form of carrying over badges from other instances would also be very useful. When someone has received their first ‘Helpful’ badge (no such badge exists by default yet), every additional instance it is shown on acts as a reminder and affirmation to this person that they are the type of community member that helps others.