Dani — MLT(ASCP)Nov 26, 2022

Reading threads of people brainstorming on how to moderate the fediverse and it's obvious a good 80% to 90% of these people have never had to moderate anything remotely as toxic as social media. Or anything at all.

I moderated a default subreddit. I don't care if you paid me a living wage. I would have burned out the same way I burned out being unpaid. It has nothing at all to do with what you get in return. It is quite literally soul-crushing, and my subreddit wasn't even as toxic as it could have been.

I want things to be the best that they can, but they need to be addressed be people who have had heavy experience with this kind of thing. Also — you are never going to find a one size fits all answer. Is everyone going to have to go with this one solution or get defederated?

I dunno, man. I want a solution, but so far the things I'm hearing that excite people are to me, with the moderating experience I have, not reassuring.

Show threadRant Ninja

@warkittens I haven't seen any concrete suggestions for mod improvements but I've done a lot of mod work in my day and could not agree more.

It is hard work and anyone who hasn't been burned by the experience was in a tightly controlled network or just didn't care.

I think there are many simple fixes but they'd *have* to be gamed out by red teams prior to implementation. It's way too easy to put in the work and miss attack vectors for harmful people and/or intentions.

Fingers crossed.

Nov 26, 2022 at 3:58amWeb
Show threadDani — MLT(ASCP)Nov 26, 2022
@rant
I think one of the easiest ways to help the whole thing succeed is swap in/out positions. It's double the people but it protects from burnout. No one should EVER be a mod that is on permanently.
L0
Show threadRant NinjaNov 26, 2022

@warkittens absolutely necessary tactic for sanity.

For scalability they're going to seriously build out the toolset. There is absolutely no way manual moderation will be sufficient to wrangle tens of thousands of users on an instance if the spammers & hate-spewers set their sights on Mastodon.

I'm sure folks must recognize this but I worry their knee-jerk implementations might cause harm to the effort. It is *not* easy or intuitive.

Stay sane ya'll.