I was invited by @futurebird (thanks!) to participate/join/comment in a discussion of moderation software, arising from a post by @cd24@sfba.social. I’m not actually a moderator and I don’t know what the current toolset offers, but I keep toying with the idea of running something in the fediverse which would probably really have need of moderation, so I sometimes turn over moderation thoughts in my head. (Run-on sentence, sorry; deep breath.) Plus, I’m really interested in the topic.

Thoughts that popped into my head (trying not to repeat what others have already said in this thread), with no particular organization:

• It should be easy to coalesce reports or deal with them in aggregate. One thing that would help is good keyboard shortcuts. If I get 60 reports about a user, it would be nice to be able to mass-select them and take some action, using a “select all” checkbox, but also, if “select all” is too broad, something like tab-space-tab-space-tab-space-etc. Not that I necessarily want to do that 60 times, but at least it’s better than n x 60 x mouse-target-click, for some n >= 1.
• There are probably better ways to aggregate/coalesce (e.g., search/filter), but that seems like a reasonable minimum.
• Really, good keyboard equivalents everywhere, but that’s just a minimum, right?
• Bearing in mind harassment, it would be nice to see the reporter’s history and maybe relation to other reporters.
• Some way of highlighting patterns. Maybe moderation decisions/reasons as tags, for both reporter and report subject? Would affect displays of historical info.
• I think, for an admin, moderation decisions are associated with defederation/possible-refederation decisions, so some (easy) way to track moderation issues associated with particular instances (e.g., frequency of reports, frequency of problematic users, both within configurable timeframes) and monitor defederated instances for improvement (if desired) (e.g., reported posts taken down, acceptable apologies (maybe? I know some people aren’t in the mood), reported users banned).

#mastodon #mastoAdmin #moderation