okay, so i haven't seen enough of the fediverse to comment on it specifically, others can do it if they want to
but i have done a lot of moderation in my time and some things are universal
like what is the purpose of moderation?
on a platform where people can mute/block content, this is a surprisingly hard question to answer
is it to punish? is it to protect? is it to prevent? is it to educate? is it to set a tone?
you see, it's not enough to just draw up a bunch of rules and give it to a bunch of people saying: "right, moderate this"
you need to have some kind of satisfying answer to all the above questions because the rules will only cover so much, without guiding principles, their application will always feel arbitrary
and i'm sorry to say but us, sw engineering types are the worst kind of people to be entrusted with dealing these problems
it goes against everything we trained for and our worlds are often much narrower than our user base's
i mean the fact i'm talking about a user base bears this out quite clearly, that's not how normal people talk, it's certainly not how i'd want my moderators to talk
like it or not, being a moderator is a job in itself, and getting good at it is hard
and no, there is no automated/algorithmic way around it, as it is a deeply human problem
Peter Ellis