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I have a VERY strong opinion that reporting as a whole is broken. (evidence collection is only one of the problems) I'd love people to "make their case and have an expected outcome of the report"... this person did X, here is evidence Y, and I want them <br />to be spoken to/suspended/monitored. Who is the victim or are you reporting on behalf of somebody else... and asking the victim what outcome they would want over the reporter expectations. most issues in mastodon are mitigation not moderation... but there <br />is no "justice". Person A and Person B is fighting and Person B says something rude, Person C reports it. Admin X watches. Moderators try to reverse engineer the context. Who has the agency here? shouldn't the report goto person A (the victim) as a <br />mediation step of "how do you want to proceed? Consider muting/block Person B, or do you want to escalate to moderators?" Why is dragging in mods so there are more people the correct answer? when the issue is between Person A and B. moderation is mostly <br />grudges, and grievances and just resolved. even the HOA mindset sucks... bullshit side effect of the moderation practices when an instance mods resolve a report with no action or a strike, and then admin X thinks it should be suspended, and they then <br />overact with fediblock abuse and suspend that instance as a whole because they don't agree with moderation of a single choice. when mods are making hundreds/thousands of choices. I'd love moderation/medition to focus on people. I'd also like to expand <br />blocklists for the bad actor instances as a concept and consider single user blocklists as well. instead of simply having instance bad lists. instance good, user bad might incentivise the admin to suspend the bad users before it tips into instance bad. <br />the problem is. there are a large group of ego driven admins who love a pile on.. and if an instance admin/mod ever annoys them, they all gang up and attack those admins... because they think they're fediblock judges. I'm also of the opinion that <br />fediverse moderation and admin should be separated. I want to build a "moderation coop" modal. There is too much ego in admins from the authority of moderation and I'd love to make admins responsible for uptime only. and safety should be somebody elses <br />responsibility. because most admins are not mentally or psychologically suitable for moderation. a pool of instances send all reports to a single mod coop and they handle moderation collectively with a democratic system. 10,000 instances with 10,000 mod <br />teams has the same mental cost as 10,000 instances with 10,000 S3 buckets. Wasted time, wasted energy, redundancy

2026-08-18 05:57:14

:PUA: Shlee booped around &

shlee@aus.social

Rant about #fediverse moderation.

2026-08-18 06:04:18

warkolm

warkolm@aus.social

@shlee

2026-08-18 06:15:43

knack

knack@aus.social

@shlee 10k * 10k is clearly too much, but it'd suck to end up with the email mafia all over again... I'd hope, if this happens, that the 'verse can keep 20+ distinct collectives going.

2026-08-18 09:47:37

Julien Goodwin

LapTop006@aus.social

@shlee nearly all of what I report is spam (and usually addressed at me), but still yes. I wonder if any of what BSKY did for moderation could be used (as an inspiration at least) for masto?

2026-08-18 11:05:14

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@:PUA: Shlee booped around & This can't work, and for one particular reason. And you should actually know this reason after eight years in the Fediverse:

The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. It's far from being only Mastodon.

It isn't 10,000 servers running one application. It's 40,000+ servers running over 150 different applications. And I'm not talking about Mastodon and otherwise Mastodon forks either.

From your words, I can clearly see that you want the whole Fediverse to be moderated by Mastodon standards.

But then you have Mastodon mods who are "based and Mastodon-pilled", and for whom the Fediverse either is or shall be only Mastodon. These mods moderate Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte servers by Mastodon's standards. Which, by the way, not only clash with the culture on these servers, but even with the technology on these servers. Friendica works a whole lot differently from Mastodon; Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte even more so.

Oh, and especially Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte don't even have the concept of moderators. I'm absolutely serious here. They don't have Mastodon's concept of reports. Why not? Because they're geared towards self-moderation. Everyone is given the power to moderate their own channels. Unimaginable on Mastodon, also because this involves technologies and features that are unimaginable on Mastodon such as the most advanced permissions systems in the whole Fediverse. Mastodon's culture is about being pampered and coddled. The culture on these three is about self-defence.

Also: You can't force Mastodon-style Mastodon moderation upon a (streams) server. You can try. But you won't succeed. The server admin won't let you. Again, I'm dead-serious here.

Unlike on Mastodon, a (streams) admin has various counter-measures available to get rid of your Mastodon mod.

They could activate the User Agent Filter and add "mastodon" to the filter list. Bam, all of Mastodon blocked, all present and future servers, in-bound and out-bound.
They could activate FedUp which blocks everything that doesn't support enclosed threaded conversations, and Mastodon doesn't, so Mastodon is blocked, too.
If everything else fails, they could turn ActivityPub support off for the whole server, thus cutting everything off that isn't (streams) or Hubzilla. (This, by the way, is even available to individual users.)

Stuff like this, by the way, Mastodon forcing its culture upon the non-Mastodon Fediverse, is the very reason why (streams) and Forte have built-in ways to defend themselves against Mastodon. And this is one reason why Hubzilla sticks to ActivityPub being optional on each channel.

Back to the Mastodon mods. They'll probably only know Mastodon. More importantly, they probably won't know anything about groups. They'll probably think the Fediverse doesn't even have groups. They'll only know users following other users.

And then they'll have to moderate on Lemmy. They'll have to moderate a group. Something they didn't even expect to exist. In a place where users can't follow other users, only subscribe to groups, because it's essentially a Reddit clone.

Worse yet, they'll have to moderate a Lemmy community with 10,000 members. All of whom are former Redditors. All of whom live by a culture that's directly derived from Reddit with no influence from Twitter or Mastodon at all. None of whom have ever been on Twitter or Mastodon. Almost none of whom even know that Mastodon exists. And many of whom have their experiences with power-tripping Lemmy moderators, so if you think they're easy to rein in with a culture that isn't theirs, you're very wrong.

(Greetings from Hubzilla.)

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Lemmy #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #Moderation #MastodonCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity