Leigh HoneywellFeb 15, 2023

Even when Twitter’s T&S infrastructure was at its most functional – which I’d say was 2021-mid 2022 – I sometimes saw appeals on content decisions, suspensions, etc. take 2-3 months unless I escalated to personal contacts at the company.

I keep seeing folks expect #moderation and community management decisions on volunteer-run fedi instances to happen in hours – not even days – and jumping to defederation when they don’t get immediate responses. It’s going to burn out so many admins, and makes me sad and worried about the sustainability and scalability of our communities.

#fediverse #fediadmin #contentmoderation #communitymanagement #mastoadmin #mastodon

Show threadverb (printfJess) 🦄Feb 15, 2023

@leigh What if the appeals could be handled by users on the server.

Like a special tab in the app, where we can review suspension appeals and vote.

This would be completely opt-in, or even opt-in then someone approves. An opt-out option would need to be immediately accessible on the same tab, to make it easy for ppl to "nope out" if the content is too much for them.

Further, users could opt-in to review specific types of suspensions. For example, nothing involving images or racism etc.

At the Admin's discretion, results could lead to immediate unsuspension after 48hrs of votes. Or the votes could prioritise what admins choose to review first. Example: if 80% of ppl vote to unsuspend, the admin could prioritise that over a 60:40 split. Or if 90% vote to keep the suspension, it's automatically retained.

Essentially a Jury of Peers system.

Show threadKaleissinFeb 15, 2023
@verb @leigh Stack overflow has systems for this. How much you interact gives you points which eventually gives you mod rights, and eventually gives you access to moderate (by scoring) the mods of other moderators. Gamified moderation, basically.
Show threadLeigh Honeywell
@kaleissin @verb Stack Overflow is still a centralized system, albeit one where things are delegated out to the edges like Reddit. Lessons to be learned there for sure but the constraints of federation change things a lot.
Feb 15, 2023 at 3:07pmWeb
Show threadKaleissinFeb 15, 2023
@leigh @verb It's per instance, so mod powers on one instance, like stackoverflow itself, doesn't give you ditto on another, say, math.stackexchange (does give you 100 points as a starter bonus though)
Show threadLeigh HoneywellFeb 15, 2023
@kaleissin @verb right but fundamentally there’s still a company designing the metrics and overriding stuff as needed. There’s no equivalent oversight mechanism – by design – in a federated system, and that’s an essential difference