Mastodawn

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.

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Nick Nov 26, 2022

@warkittens

I’ve seen some worrying posts from an admin whose instance went from somewhere in the hundreds of people to more than 10,000. I felt a little helpless because it sounded like they were heading for a burnout but I’m just a random person who doesn’t even have an account on their server, and I realistically can’t offer any help.

I really wonder if we are approaching this from the wrong end. I get the fediverse needs to be welcoming (I only joined a few weeks back) and there has to be a place where people can take a look around. But beyond a flagship/tryout instance, I wonder if open signups and big servers are the thing that has to go away.

I’m posting this from a personal instance (which I started up as a test — not sure if I will keep it going).

I might let another one or two good friends on here, people I know IRL and whom I trust not to be idiots online. People where my baseline expectation would be that their content will never need moderation. So I should have very little actual moderating to do. (And if a different instance disagrees with my definition of what “not being an idiot online” means, then they can block my entire instance.)

So I wonder if the content moderation problem is a specific problem that big, open-signup instances have. For the rest, should we maybe focus on (a) vetting membership and (b) suspending or blocking entire instances?

We would need (formal or informal) size limits on instances, and it would have to be easier for people to spin up their own. We would need a couple open-signup instances so that people can get a sense of how the fediverse works (and there the moderation problem will continue to exist), but maybe accounts there should simply expire after a month. You get a month to look around and either find an instance that will let you on or start your own.

I know this will *severely* limit the growth of the fediverse. We can no longer boast about tens of thousands of people having joined in the last day or week or whatever. But the choice may very well be between fast growth and sustainable growth.

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Dani — MLT(ASCP)Nov 26, 2022

@nick
I don't disagree. There are gonna be people who are totally fine with running instances with those kinds of numbers, and working out moderation for that size. But I think that people are going to need to think about what size and effort they are willing to deal with, and cap ahead of time.

It's obviously no one's fault at this point. No one expected the birb to go down in flames this fast. But many, many smaller instances will make moderation much easier.

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Nick

@warkittens

Absolutely. It goes beyond moderation, too. There was a very scary thread on the birdsite about the legal/liability implications of running a Mastodon instance. If you’re running a personal instance, it doesn’t matter so much, I guess, because it’s just you and you’re responsible for your own actions anyway. But an instance with thousands or tens of thousands of users … from copyright issues to illegal content, this could cause massive headaches to admins.