Hi Michael and everyone. I wrote up some general notes for thinking about this…

#The need for community-level moderation:

I think most Mastodon users get by fine with the standard individual-level options – you follow people you find interesting and block people who act obnoxious when you encounter them. There’s no algorithm pushing obnoxious content onto your ‘home’ feed, nor is it easy for harassers to discover your posts. The first level of discovery is the ‘local timeline’ – this is the main place where members of TheATL.social interact with each other, and why the top priority is to have good moderation of content posted on TheATL.social itself. We already has a clear set of policies for members of the community.

These same moderation policies can be applied to members of other communities – blocking those who violate our rules from interacting with members of our community. However, this strategy has some limitations – first, it effectively asks our moderators to moderate the entire Fediverse, which is an impossible task, especially when harassers may have multiple accounts. It also leaves our users exposed to coordinated harassment campaigns across communities – as long as the harassers are allowed to keep their accounts, they can swarm one target after another and systematically drive anyone they dislike off Mastodon.

Finally, I think we also need to consider indirect interactions, such as slander. It’s not enough for a user to be shielded from abusive messages if the abuser continues to spread rumors among the user’s acquaintances. For this reason, I’d be inclined to simply cut off any community that allows an abuser to participate… though of course, we don’t have the resources to litigate slander accusations.

#What are the options for community-level moderation?

The Mastodon software provides three options for Moderating entire websites. ‘Suspend’ (aka defederation/block) is a complete block; ‘limiting’ (aka silencing) will only prevent content from showing on the federated timeline (If I understand it correctly); ‘reject media’ will avoid copying/showing any images.

TheATL.social currently blocks 5 servers (1 is a subdomain) (see ‘Moderated Servers’). My understanding is that this is a pretty light touch in terms of typical Mastodon moderation. Other community administrators have created long lists of communities that they consider problematic, and others have compiled these into composite blocklists such as Oliphant. Communities can be placed on these lists for a wide range of reasons, so there’s some risk of going along with over-zealous blocking.

Note also that individual users can import these blocklists – so they can hide themselves from these communities, but doing it alone means that a user may be cut out of conversations that their other friends/contacts/acquaintances are participating in.