Calling all devs! We need moderation tools that can deal with the growth of Lemmy.

Beehaw admins: there are only four of us moderating everything

Community: so ask people to be ~~admins~~ mods

Beehaw admins: i can't understand a goddamn word you're saying

Edit: meant to say mods not admins

You are now banned from participating in Beehaw
- lol, that's not the point dude.
"Only 4 of us moderating"

"Refuses to add mods meanwhile accepting 1000s of applications to join and building said community in a federated space where anyone outside their instance can participate"

Yep, definitely well planned out by those folks hahaha.
It doesn’t make sense for moderators to have full admin access. Lemmy allows multiple moderators to a work a community, and BeeHaw just needs to do that.
- Yeah that was my mistake, I meant to say mods, not admins

I personally find beehaw's moderation weird, I get that you're trying to create a safe and regulated space, but you simple can't do that with 4 mods on the entire instance. I do think that their decision to jump to defederation is a result of these 4 people being overworked and simply not having the time to rationally evaluate the situation.

if they want to continue like this they'll have to evaluate on whether to appoint proper mods to their communities or just decide to change their stance on "safe" content.

Honestly, I respect their decision but at the same time I wonder why they didn't create a standalone unfederated from the get go.

If you want to keep the community small and tightly nit it's just not compatible with the federation system. Now people got invested in some beehaw communities only to end up disconnected from them.

Still, it's not like there is a guide for this. We are all learning how to make the federation work. I hope we can keep it civil toward instances that choose to defederate.

We are all invested in the same thing: Making Lemmy successful.
- Isn't a lot of Beehaws complaints the lack of moderation on other instances, not specifically their own?
  
  If they're struggling with managing their own content, they certainly shouldn't have to worry about content from other instances. Any instance that hasn't managed to sort out their own moderation should be defederated until they figure it out.
  
  Every individual community inside each instance should have its own set of moderators or it should not exist.
I think that’s the point. They know they can’t manage moderation, don’t yet have a governance structure to support adding a lot of mods, etc.

Defederating as a means of controlling growth while you build the capability to support that growth isn’t awful. As long as people still want to be a part of it once you can get a handle on it.

I can code, but I've never been a moderator. What kind of mod tools do you want?

EDIT: More discussion about mod tools: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3281

Fricking flairs, they're very important in the communities that I'm moderating. With an ability to set multiple flairs at once because on reddit you can set only one which sucks because some posts can fit criteria to get 2 or more flairs.
- Here's a relevant GH issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/317

There doesn’t seem to be many moderation tools for people who don’t own the instance

Yet. Sync for Lemmy should be coming out in 4~ weeks and Memmy is heavily inspired by Apollo and is being developed fast.

Though I wouldn't expect mod tools in their first release.
- I like Mlem as an Apollo successor more than Memmy (used both)
Even if you own an instance, the tools are non-existent.

Some basics things that should be present but aren't:

A user directory for search and deletion

Possibility to block communities for your whole instance

Basic statistics. Both on the community and instance level

Possibility to mute a user without banning them

Allow creating a community but only after admin approval (right now it's free for all or admin only)

Easy access to server logs without having to dig directly inside the hosting server

Importing block/allow lists for federations using a file or url

Adding an administrator from the server admin UI

The API is also lacking in a way that some of those things are not possible without deploying your own API talking directly with the postgress database.

For example, if you wanted to see upvote/downvotes for each individual users, the data to calcultate it is in the database but the Lemmy API doesn't provide that functionality.

While Lemmy is great as a platform, the management side of is glueing everything together just enough to not let it implode.
My team and I are planning to start working on an AutoMod bot in the near future. It's going to be built with our custom instance in mind, but the code will he open source for everyone to use.

okay, let's talk turkey. let's define some requirements for the mod tools, and then we can start talking about how to satisfy those requirements.

Yea this is really important, and also we need a way to moderate the moderators so we don't end up with the "super" mods we saw on Reddit...

Just contacting admins of your instance would do, they have the ability to remove and appoint new mods.
- this is called "meta-moderation" and is a good idea @[email protected] :) it's part of the Santa Clara Principles of transparent moderation (https://santaclaraprinciples.org/)

Has this ever happened? From what I can tell asking people to fix their issues is the first step, and defederation only happens when they can't/won't fix them yet

Not sure if there's any lore behind it but I've also seen this. The beehaw admins seem to have an habit of making problems go away by pressing the magic button.
- Yeah, after reading that I think the defederation was a quite serious mistake on their part that will probably cause a lot of people to abandon their instance.

See this post of mine which was prompted by a mastodon dev reviewing moderation tools on lemmy and kbin:

https://lemmy.ml/post/1286830

I had a conversation with the reviewer, and my impression was that headway could be made without too much difficulty.

If anyone’s keen, and willing to work in rust or Typescript, there’s probably work you could be doing right now to make better moderation tools.
- I know typescript but not rust. Ive been hearing a lot of chatter about Matrix - do I install and join a server to get plugged into the dev community for lemmy? Or where should I be hanging out to get an idea of what needs to be done? Github?

Who defederated now?

Nobody de-federated. People saw that there was a the_Donald community on sh.itjust.works + a lot of people from said server defending it ("just ignore it bro"). That triggered probably bad memories ala spez defending t_D because of "VaLuABlE DiSCuSsIoN", while they brigaded and harrased countless people during their time on Reddit. Some people got a little bit carried away and demanded de-federation and a couple of trolls throw gazoline in the fire.
- A community does not have a right to exist on a certain person's server. They should delete The_Donald and move on.
- Nobody de-federated
  
  Beehaw defederated sh.itjust.works and I think Lemmy.world
- This is one of the personal fears I have about society's where 'the mob' decides. Most people haven't had their fate decided by a mob before and so might not know what this means or how it pans out most of the time.
  
  I believe it is imperative that we have something in place to avoid mob actions - not a central authority per say but possibly a collective code we all believe in and abide by. We could perhaps establish what is (un)acceptable on a fediversal (universal) scale and what is (un)acceptable on a local instances (instances decide this themselves obv.)
  
  In the future we might need Lemmy/ActivityPub to be able to define posts/accounts/communities that are accessible across the Fediverse and those that are only accessible to users of that instance.
  
  Hence we wouldn't have the problem where for instance: members of one instance think pictures of furries is not NSFW content but members from other instances think it is

An iOS app would be wonderful. It's the only thing stopping me from being a full-time Lemmy user right now.

There is one called Mlem. You can find it and other apps on the website: https://join-lemmy.org/apps
- Seems to be country locked, not available in Germany at least.
- There is also Memmy: https://lemmy.ml/c/memmy
don't worry, they're coming. a bunch of bigger third party app Devs have said they will make an app for Lemmy, and that will include iOS apps as well I'm sure. it's just a matter of time.
There is an app called Memmy (which I’m current using!) which both looks good and is good! If on iOS, just go download “TestFlight” and find the website that has the invite for Memmy or Mlem as the user before me mentioned.
- This should be a working invite if you’re wanting to try it out: https://testflight.apple.com/join/xQfmkJhc

Defed is the new Ban Hammer

Except instead of banning people for no reason you ban entire servers for no reason
- Think of it as banning an entire server until they clean up that server.
  
  Until there are tools to more granularly ban specific comminities or users, it’s the only thing you can do if you don’t want nazis.

All of the memes and threads I've seen complaining about this are from the instances that are being defederated, rather than from within Beehaw itself. In fact if you go and read the threads where they discuss these changes it seems the majority of the Beehaw users are okay with this.

Reddit admins made a unilateral change that the majority didn't like and now we're all here on Lemmy, why is everyone suddenly acting like Lemmy instances are any different?

What was Elmo supposed to have been doing in the innocent interpretation of this image? I swear they had to have known.

Pretty sure it's not from an episode of sesame street but something parodying it
I think Elmo is supposed to be choosing "healthy sugars" like those in fruit but he can't resist the pile of sugar instead. Like most sugar junkies :p

A lot of the requests I've seen is people trying to create another echo chamber

It's decentralised. Echo chambers will fundamentally be more profound.

Post your requirements for those tools. Is it a web app? A browser addon? What features does it need?

Would it be relatively straightfoward to port other forums tools here?

It would not. Different tech stack, different services.
Not easily from what I’ve gathered. But making tools in this way is broadly what the fediverse needs.

Testing