Whole network messages

The biggest difficulty is that there is no technical difference between disinterest, moderation and censorship in a gossip protocol like Scuttlebutt. Instead, the differences are about user intention and scale.

1. I can block you because I don't like your content. As a consequence, I do not relay for you, and your feed does not spread as easily.
2. I can block you because a moderation decision tells me to, and I choose to obey that moderation decision. As a consequence, I do not relay for you, and your feed does not spread as easily.
3. I can block you because I am forced to do so (by some power I cannot easily overcome - court order, gangsters threatening my family, whatever). As a consequence, I do not relay for you, and your feed does not spread as easily.

In all three cases, the technical aspect is that, having blocked you, I refuse to relay for you, and as a consequence of my block, your feed does not spread as far. But the social context of the three reasons for blocking makes them qualitatively different.

In the first case, it's a personal decision - if lots of people make the same decision, then your content isn't seen by many people, but we're each coming to that decision independently, and you're just unpopular.

In the second case, it's getting a bit more blurred - I may disagree with this specific moderation decision if I consider it in detail, but I'm following it because I follow all moderation decisions from that source (e.g. because they're normally ones I agree with). That, however, implies that the entity making the moderation decisions has delegated power - if they target one class of views, or one individual, for suppression, but most of their decisions were good, then even spot-checking their decisions may well not reveal to me that I'm also suppressing content I agree with. However, if I do notice an error, I can (at least in theory) undo it by unblocking you.

And in the third case, we've definitely crossed the line into censorship; it's entirely possible that I want to spread your content, but I can't because I'm being forced to block you.

I'd also suspect that it's a lot easier to surveil than you imply; small world networks have the properties they have because they have nodes that have a lot of unique neighbours (as well as nodes whose neighbours are all neighbours themselves). If you can identify the nodes that link a lot of neighbourhoods together, it's not hard to surveil most of the network - the last fraction may be very hard to reach, but you probably don't care about that.