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 threadKim Crayton ~ Her/SheFeb 15, 2023
@leigh this is one of the reasons I developed the “Rules of Engagement” which helps me quickly evaluate a situation and prioritize my strategy…folx seldom consider the human toll moderation takes, particularly when they’re actively being “harmed”, on those tasked with this role…the only real long-term solution I see is the establishment of strong community norms rooted in harm reduction, for self-regulation, while leaving the more complex decisions to a core team…not perfect though
Show threadLeigh HoneywellFeb 15, 2023
@KimCrayton1 this is a great framework, thank you for sharing it 🙏 I’m curious your thoughts on the speed-of-response issue - I feel like it’s a problem for small and volunteer run instances even if one does have a good framework (like yours) in place for moderation. Mods need to sleep 😅
Show threadKim Crayton ~ Her/SheFeb 15, 2023

@leigh this is a huge concern and what I did when I had my Kim’s Community Cafe on Discord was to ensure that I had enough TRAINED moderators across time zones and had them on a “moderation” schedule.

I benefited from doing the unheard of and locking things down so that the cafe was only “open” when I had enough folx there to monitor.

We also, used bots to remind and encourage folx to use inclusive language and had facilitated conversations to model expected behavior.

Show threadLeigh HoneywellFeb 15, 2023
@KimCrayton1 I love the idea of having opening and closing hours! Such a nice change of pace ☺️
Show threadKim Crayton ~ Her/She
@leigh yep…I knew that I only had bandwidth for a certain number of hours per week, so the Cafe was only open, unless there was some unexpected thing that happens that folx would benefit from from a safe space to process, on Friday’s from 8am-8pm EST.
Feb 15, 2023 at 3:23pmWeb