Federated Moderation: Towards Delegated Moderation?
https://lemmy.ml/post/60475
lemmy.mlFederated Moderation: Towards Delegated Moderation? - Lemmy## Moderation on the Fediverse Right now when people install federated server
instances of any kind that are open for others to join, they take on the job to
be the instance admin. When membership grows, they attract additional moderators
to help with maintenance and assuring a healthy community. I haven’t been admin
or mod myself, but AFAIK the moderation work is mostly manual, based on the
specific UI administrative features offered by a particular app. Metrics are
collected about instance operation, and federated messages come in from members
(e.g. Flag and Block). There’s a limited set of moderation measures that can be
taken (see e.g. Mastodon’s Moderation docs
[https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/]). The toughests actions that
can be taken are to blocklist an entire domain (here’s the list for
mastodon.social [https://mastodon.social/about/more#unavailable-content], the
largest fedi instance). #### The burden of moderating I think (but pls correct
me) that in general there are two important areas for improvement from
moderators perspective: - Moderation is very time-consuming. - Moderation is
somewhat of an unthankful, underappreciated job. It is time-consuming to monitor
what happens on your server, to act timely on moderation request, answer
questions, get informed about other instances that may have to be blocked. It is
unthankful / underappreciated because your instance members take it for granted,
and because you are often the bad guy when acting against someone who
misbehaved. Moderation is often seen as unfair and your decisions fiercely
argued. Due to these reasons instances are closed down, or are under-moderated
and toxic behavior can fester. (There’s much more to this, but I’ll leave it
here for now) ## Federating Moderation From the Mastodon docs: > Moderation in
Mastodon is always applied locally, i.e. as seen from the particular server. An
admin or moderator on one server cannot affect a user on another server, they
can only affect the local copy on their own server. This is a good, logical
model. After all, you only control your own instance(s). But what if the
federation tasks that are bound to the instance got help from ActivityPub
federation itself? Copying from this post
[https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/improving-fediverse-culture-and-social-behavior/1397/5?u=aschrijver]:
The whole instance discovery / mapping of the Fediverse network can 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 - Domain blocklisting / allowlisting actions are 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 whether to block the domain for
their own instance or not. ## Delegated moderation When having Federated
Moderation it may also be possible to delegate moderation tasks to admins of
other instances who are authorized to do so, or even have ‘roaming moderators’
that are not affiliated to any one instance. I have described this idea already,
but from the perspective of Discourse forums having native federation
capabilities. See Discourse: Delegating Community Management
[https://meta.discourse.org/t/community-has-no-boundary-discourse-as-a-fabric-ideation-brainstorm/174578/12?u=aschrijver].
Why would you want to delegate moderation: - Temporarily, while looking for new
mods and admins. - When an instance is under attack by trolls and the like, ask
extra help - When there is a large influx of new users ####
Moderation-as-a-Service (Copied and extended from this post
[https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/improving-fediverse-culture-and-social-behavior/1397/8?u=aschrijver])
But this extension to the Moderation model goes further… we can have
Moderation-as-a-Service. Experienced moderators and admins gain reputation and
trust. They can offer their services, and can be rewarded for the work they do
(e.g. via Donations, or otherwise). They may state their available time and
timeslots in which they are available, so I could invoke their service and
provide 24/7 monitoring of my instance. The Reputation model of available
moderators might even be federated. So I can see history of their work,
satisfaction level / review by others, amount of time spent / no. of Incidents
handled, etc. All of this could be intrinsic part of the fabric of the
Fediverse, and extend across different application types. There would be much
more visibility to the under-appreciated task of the moderator, and as the model
matures more features can be added e.g. in the form of support for Moderation
Policies. Like their Code of Conduct different instances would like different
governance models (think democratic voting mechanisms, or Sortition
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition]. See also What would a fediverse
“governance” body look like?
[https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/what-would-a-fediverse-governance-body-look-like/1497]).
Note: Highly recommend to also check the toot thread about this post, as many
people have great insights there:
https://mastodon.social/web/statuses/106059921223198405
[https://mastodon.social/web/statuses/106059921223198405]
