I think QoL tools for moderators need to become more of a Fediverse priority. This burns people out. Key moderators of communities quit and communities become abandoned.
Ideas :
- Automatic removal option to remove posts and/or comments for specific keywords. This would be most useful for automatically removing posts and comments when people slur. Piefed already has a keyword filter for visibility. This could be expanded to community settings. Have it also fire-off a report to the moderators when someone triggers it.
- Automatic URL removal. Allow communities to blacklist specific urls. Useful for politics or news communities that want to negate sources known for misinformation.
- Automatic removal for repeat URL posting. Very useful for politics or news communities to prevent double-posting.
- Make it so a community can set itself up to only accept text posts, video posts, or image posts. This should prevent tedious janitorial cleanup for communities that only allow links, or text posts (the most common two).
- Post Delay Restrictions. Some communities, perhaps not many, might be interested in posting cooldowns for users. So you can only post 1 post every hour, or 2 posts every hour - or whatever the chosen limit is. This would help negate spammers and over-enthusiastic posters flooding a topical community.
- Post Formatting Requirements. This one could be trickier and more effort than most of the others, but setting conditions for the formatting of new posts would be useful.
Now, not all communities would make use or have any need to make use of all of these - but many would to varying degrees - and it would help them.
I think going down this road is important to prevent moderators burning out over the drudgery of moderating communities.
99% of communities need more content, not less.
Yes, although communities on here already roll with some of these rules. Some don’t want double link posting or want to ban specific urls or specific keywords - they just have to do it manually. This can cause mod burnout over time.
That could happen in the future but at the moment and in the past surely we lost more mods as a result of their community being dead than from their community being too active. But we don’t hear from them because they feel rejected and like they failed so they slink away quietly.
True. I am just mostly trying to make a record of this stuff for the future. Obviously in the event of these tools existing, mods wouldn’t have to turn them on.
I definitely think there needs to be some rough guide on making your community federated and then advertising it effectively so communities can get that early kick.
there needs to be some rough guide on making your community federated and then advertising it effectively so communities can get that early kick.
We can draft something on !fedigrow@lemmy.zip
This burns people out. Key moderators of communities quit and communities become abandoned.
Are you referring to something specific? I haven’t seen a trend of a lot of mods quitting, modding is just not that attractive in the first place
lemm.ee shutdown for that reason
The kind of drama Lemm.ee was experiencing wouldn’t be mitigated by any automatic measure, it was mostly human factors
I suppose not. Although I imagine if the Fediverse gets more users it will happen more and more. The current mod tools are not really up to the job as it increases in activity.
Automatic removal for repeat URL posting
That seems like the best of these ideas. But it would be better for the originating instance to warn the poster that their url has already been seen and stop them posting it unless they really really want to.
Well yeah Piefed actually already does this. But some people will just ignore it even if everyone uses Piefed. I would make use of blocking repeat-url posting and have it so anyone who ignores it has their post automatically removed or blocked.
If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.
By now I’ve written four bots using the lemmy API.
Any one of your ideas is doable in a weekend if I ever feel the need for a modding bot. But I haven’t. Several communities and instances already have them.
Honestly that’s how it should be. Modding can have such diverse needs depending on community that just implementing every possible eventuality into lemmy itself, is a huge ask.
Any large community on discord, reddit and other platforms, make extensive use of automod bots. Because using the API, you can write bots that do whatever you can think of.
Modding is volunteer work, but it is work.
If you need tools, find them. If they don’t exist, create them. If you don’t have the skills or time, then don’t volunteer.
Asking some volunteers to do more than they already are because you think they are letting down another set of volunteers just risks burning out a different set of volunteers.
In Skavau’s defense, they aren’t a programmer, but are probably one of the most active people on piefed’s chat server/matrix room as well as the codeberg repo providing ideas and feedback. So they are volunteering time that way (in addition to being site staff for piefed.social).
Some of the ideas in this post are good imo, but are currently not possible yet using the piefed api due to it being much less complete compared to lemmy’s. So, it helps us figure out prioritization on what kinds of endpoints would be useful to flesh out next.
Indeed.
My core point is that when it comes to moderation, I would prioritize actual mod actions (such as a mod being able to mark posts nsfw instead of deleting them outright) and API support for those actions, over built-in automod features.
Once you have an API, anyone with the skills can implement whatever automation they need.
After that, I would priotize a bunch of other things, too, before ever coming back around to built-in automod features.
There are a lot of people who make excellent mods who are not programmers. It’s already a small enough pool that requiring a particular skill only further narrows the pool. It also has a secondary effect that good mods may be unwilling to take on larger communities, or additional responsibilities.
If we want better moderation, the fediverse has to become more friendly to non technical people.
That’s not what I’m saying.
Obviously not everyone needs to code. Once I write a bot, it could potentially be used by anyone.
Only a small percentage of mods need to also be developers. But since that group isn’t big enough yet, the solution is growth.
Not asking the platform devs to do even more. They too, are volunteers.
Fair, thanks for the clarification.
To be clear, I’m not thinking about Lemmy here specifically. But in any case, however its done - either via the settings, or an easy to access official or officially endorsed mod-bot - access and knowledge to and of these tools should be easy and well-known for community owners.
If you need tools, find them. If they don’t exist, create them. If you don’t have the skills or time, then don’t volunteer.
Not every would-be moderator of a community has the skills or knowhow to make and/or host these things. Even Reddit now, at its size, lacks some capable tools not consistently covered in automod tools.
I’m not against any of that.
What I disagree with is that this is a priority. It’s a nice-to-have.
Once mod actions are supported, and an API exists, any imaginable automation can be implemented by anyone with the impetus to do so.
As such, the priority of further integration drops drastically and platform developer attention can and should move elsewhere.
Mod tools are best created by the people who use them. Even better when they are created for the needs of a specific community. As such, more advanced features should be deferred until later.
Once communities grow large enough that there are a significant number of moderator-developers around, it might be worth creating a generic bot that can be configured as needed. (As has happened with reddit, discord, etc.)
Asking for these tools before then, is inefficient, because the people who ideally should be working on them, haven’t shown up yet, and the platform developers time is better spent on other things.
Well I’m thinking in terms of how to ‘shore up’ the fediverse, so to speak - to make it able to cope with potential future growth. I do think all of the examples in my OP that I’ve given are pretty general and one or more of them would be implemented by most communities the moment they were able to do so.
The platform should provide some of these out of the box, in my opinion.
I am trying to build a new activitypub powered platform just for user scriptable moderation bots, but I am stuck on the modular federation design.
This is my third attempt now.
Interesting, why do you think that scriptable moderation bots need a completely new platform? Wouldnt it be much easier to utilize the Lemmy api directly?
Well, my initial idea was to build this only for lemmy and yes it would be easier that way if I didn’t care about scalability.
However, the API was not good enough for my use case. Polling new posts and comments was my main issue with it. So mostly scaling issues. You could miss some posts and comments. The amount of API requests would get bigger with the amount of communities the bot moderates. There are also some problems with the rate limits.
They can be solved by directly querying the database, but who’s going to give you database access? So you’d have to host lemmy yourself just for the bot. And I’d imagine the database would grow pretty fast with the number of communities. I explicitly do not want to store any posts or comments.
Another solution would be using Lemmy’s new webhook system, but I don’t know how reliable it will be.
So I stopped halfway through and started a new project with new goals:
- Make a new federated platform
With federation, the problems above would be solved. This also allows it to be hosted without having to find an instance for it or even self host it yourself.
- Stronger integration with platforms via a modular federation system
If I made it depend on Lemmy, a strong integration with other platforms wouldn’t be possible. Piefed has features that Lemmy doesn’t, for example. People can maintain a set of platform specific activitypub structs and enable the bot to federate with that platform.
Not really answering your question, but I’d like to make a clarification: The bots will only be able to operate within the boundaries of the communities they are appointed to (or I guess groups). They cannot manage any instances. Furthermore, my main intention is for them to be used primarily as moderation bots, but they can also be used as general purpose bots within the community.
To get new posts and comments for all known communities you only need to make regular requests to
/api/v3/post/list?limit=50&sort=New&type_=Alland/api/v3/comment/list?limit=50&sort=New&type_=All. Its not necessary to make separate requests for each community. The default rate limit allows 180 read requests per minute so you can comfortably poll this every second (in practice every 30s or so should be enough). If you miss an item (ie post or comment id was skipped) just load the following page.The plugin system in 1.0 would be another option. It will still take some time until that is released, but there shouldnt be any reliability issues.
Youre right that federation solves these problems, but instead you get another problem of writing all this federation code and making sure it is compatible with different platforms. Lemmy’s federation code has around 12k lines so that is a lot. It seems much simpler to use the API for Lemmy, Piefed etc and write abstractions for common functionality.
Anyway this is my opinion. Its your project so in the end its your decision how to implement it.
It’s open source, send a pull request
For the first option, if possible, having it be manually whitelisted per post/comment or user, would also be handy.
Not directly related, but I’d also like to know where and how to donate to the Lemmy devs and instances, to support the fediverse.
You can donate for Lemmy development through the link below. Thank you in advance :)
May I suggest instead donating to the Piefed project if you wish to donate at all - given its faster development cycle currently.
And since you’re from blahaj, your own instance also has a piefed.blahaj variant.
What are the differences between piefed and lemmy? Is one financed/supported/organised by commercial companies (or people that work for them)? Are they both grassroots and independent? Do they combat algorithms? Or something else?
Yes, piefed is independent in the same way as lemmy is.
Piefed has tools that Lemmy does not: Flairs, user flairs, hashtags, custom feeds/topics, scheduled posts, poll posting, events - word filters for users.
Most of these features are also implemented in Lemmy, and others too such as private communities (which can only be browser by users that were manually approved by moderators). However we have very high standards for correctness, performance and UX so it takes a while to get all of this released in the upcoming 1.0 version.
If you want to donate to lemmy instances (or the devs as well if the other replies haven’t changed your mind) a lot of them are on Liberapay and if yours isn’t, they probably have a donate link on their web UI.
Don’t donate to the Lemmy devs except if you are ok with supporting transphobes and tankies, because that’s what the Lemmy-Devs are (and it’s very well documented!). Donate either to the piefed team or to your local instance instead!
Donations are to pay for the development of Lemmy which is a full-time job and pays for our bills. Donating to Lemmy does not mean “supporting transphobes and tankies”, thats a really weird thing to say.
