Improving moderation practices and tools
I really like your ideas, @tfardet. Now, tbh, I don’t know anything about how instance admins currently go about their business and which automatic tools they have at their disposal versus manual procedures. And I wonder whether more documentation and discussion at SocialHub are in order. Maybe just like Guide for ActivityPub users and Guide for new ActivityPub implementers we need a Guide for ActivityPub Admins
Federated Moderation
These are highlighting features for end-users to be offered on an instance. I wonder (and this may already exist, idk) whether the whole instance discovery / mapping of the network should be federated. E.g.:
- A new server is detected
- Instance updates internal server list
- Instance federates (
Announce) the new server - Other instances update their server list
- Blocklisting / Allowlisting is announced (with reason)
Then in addition to that Moderation Incidents can be collected as metrics and federated as soon as they occur:
- User mutes / blocks, instance blocks (without PII, as it is the metric counts that are relevant)
- Flags (federated after they are approved by admins, without PII)
- Incidents may include more details (reason for blocking, topic e.g. ‘misinformation’)
So a new instance pops up, and all across fedi people start blocking its users. There’s probably something wrong with the instance that may warrant blocklisting. Instance admin goes to the server list, sees a large incident count for a particular server, clicks the entry and gets a more detailed report on the nature of said incident. Makes the decision to block the domain or not.
Pixelfed new moderation tools
I just saw @dansup Pixelfed’s toot announcement of new moderation tools:
Our safety and moderation tools like disabled comments, spam detection and violation warnings are unique in the fediverse. We have been working on a new generation of safety and moderation tools that will be rolling out soon!
Here are the screenshots that came with the toot:
