Instances can now self-report moderators and sysadmin staff counts

After I saw this post from beehaw.org,and this post about mastodon I thought of this feature to allow instance administrators to report how many sysadmins and how many moderators they have on staff for their instance.

The idea is that one can use this information to see if any instances are struggling to maintain themselves based on their size. For example, an instance of 10K users like lemmy.dbzer0.com would not be manageable without extra support.

Why these two roles specifically? because in my experience, these are the most important ones for a fediverse instance to have and it's unlikely the owner of the instance is good enough to do both at the same time. For example, I'm a great sysadmin, but I suck at moderation duties.

Both of these skills tend to be OK to leave to one person if an instance is small (say, below 1000 users), where the owner can get away with relying on searchable docker commands and and built-in moderation tools. However above that number, an inexperienced owner at one or both of these will find themselves in trouble.

This information starts as null for each claimed or guaranteed instance on the fediseer, which effectively means "unknown". Instance admins who have claimed their instances can then use the PATCH option on the /api/v1/whitelist endpoint to specify how many sysadmins and/or moderators they currently have.

curl -X 'PATCH' \
  'https://fediseer.com/api/v1/whitelist/lemmy.dbzer0.com' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'apikey: YOUR_KEY_HERE' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
  "sysadmins": 1,
  "moderators": 3
}'

Yes, one can also see how many "admins" an instance has from their public info, but a lot of fediverse software do not provide the full picture. For example mastodon only shows one admin, whereas lemmy admins have no distinction between the two. So you could see a lemmy instance with 4 admins, of which they're all moderators, and they have no experience sysadmin on staff.

My hope is that this information can then be used to find instances where people can volunteer support, and also be used by tools suggesting new instances to promote instances with good staff health.