Over the past few months I’ve been putting my UX Interviewing hat on and helping @jenniferplusplus’s Letterbook project, by talking to a variety of people doing moderation work, largely in the Fedi space

Jenniferplusplus

@technomancy @mattly
plugin system for what?

technomancy (turbonerd aspect)

@mattly one I really like the idea of moving moderator actions into ActivityPub where possible instead of bespoke admin UIs, but I guess this mostly relies on a lot of standardization work happening to define the necessary vocabulary

but a stopgap measure perhaps could be say for example a bot which could plug into a read-only view of the DB and respond to queries to provide context about a certain user or conversation in question

of course in this model your visualization and interaction options are severely constrained so maybe that's not much of an improvement; I dunno

but it does have the advantage that it can be developed, deployed, and upgraded independently of the server implementation

technomancy (turbonerd aspect)

@jenniferplusplus @mattly a while back I hacked a bit on gotosocial to add a lua-based plugin system that could do MRF-adjacent type stuff:

GitHub - technomancy/gotosocial at plugin

Golang fediverse server. Contribute to technomancy/gotosocial development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub (github.com)

it's all fairly bitrotten by now and I've forgotten everything I know about golang and how their dependency system works

Matthew Lyon

@technomancy @jenniferplusplus yeah, I remember you talking about this, I think such a thing could have some success if done right, but that’s gonna be *hard*; I have a much better idea as to what properties such a system should have now & also a better idea of some of the challenges that would exist across server softwares

technomancy (turbonerd aspect)

@mattly @jenniferplusplus I lovelovelove the idea of a preview UI that could show you what effect a given plugin would have applied over a set of existing posts

the other thing I only just now realized is that given the ubiquity of Lua implementations/bindings, if you defined the API agnostically enough, you could probably build a plugin system that could share the same plugins across Mastodon, gotosocial, Akkoma, etc?

Matthew Lyon

@technomancy @jenniferplusplus yeah though I think that’d be a hard part to get right; my understanding is that there’s a lot of spread between the underlying data models involved

Matthew Lyon

@technomancy many of the ideas that I’m coming up with for what I’ll call “situational context” across both individual flag activities and community awareness involve aggregate queries or things that would be difficult to define in any kind of standardized form

that’s not to say your idea isn’t good! it’s just, I think with things as they are now, it’d be like trying to communicate through a straw instead of something richer

Matthew Lyon

I’ll also put it out there that this sort of “UX/UI/Prototyping/ The Human Part of Software Design / especially for technical/nuanced problems” is what I consult for, and I have availability

technomancy (turbonerd aspect)

@mattly admittedly my idea was motivated largely by the question "how could I contribute without first having to learn either golang or javascript?"

so yeah, definitely of limited utility

Matthew Lyon

@technomancy I LLOL’d

Amber

@[email protected] @[email protected] This sums up a lot of frustration in a nutshell. Not sure if we particularly talked about post visibility but I've made complaints on this account publicly before.

Sometimes a post that is part of a report is a response to a post that's been deleted, and since the server software deletes those posts immediately, the full thread is gone. It's completely possible for a report to become "un-solveable" by any reasonable standard, but the model around ActivityPub flags don't allow for this.

It's really unfortunate how software doesn't save an "archive" of a reported note. This is just a bandaid to the underlying problem but it would reduce the amount of times I've had to close a report. It's really unfortunate when I have to close a report because there is no longer anything "actionable". I am hesitant to 100% follow the words of the reporter (something which you also touch up on) because I cannot be sure that we both agree on what constitutes a violation of rules. I've found that most instances report things that violate their rules to us, instead of forwarding reports for rule violations of our own rules. This is fine, but it means that what may be a rule violation to another instance is completely acceptable here. Having to read through a remote instance's rules and make that determination is not fun.

Not to mention the fact most instance admins do not specify an action they'd like to be taken. How do I know the severity of a report? Does the remote instance want me to suspend this local user? Is a silence sufficient? Are they just passing it along as a heads up and do they want me to do anything? This is a big communication issue and it's unfortunate it often times gets lost when a report comes in from an instance I don't have an existing relationship with the administration on. If I get a report from Labyrinth.zone I can reach out to Vel for clarification. If I get a report from an instance I've never heard of... now I am stuck trying to track down their contact information and figure out how to establish communication off platform. 1/?

Jenniferplusplus

@puppygirlhornypost2 @mattly multiple people shared concerns in this area

Amber

@[email protected] @[email protected] yup ik. just wanted to get out some more information

Amber

@[email protected] @[email protected] it's genuinely so annoying when i get a report and i don't know what to do with it. I constantly think "is remote going to be mad i didn't take action?" and other questions

Matthew Lyon

@puppygirlhornypost2 @jenniferplusplus you know, now I’m wondering how many of these inter-instance admin spats we hear about are caused by the poor design of the protocol & tooling in this area

Amber

@[email protected] @[email protected] Too many actually. The amount of times a report just didn't federate over, and someone gets mad because they see an inaction on the instance administrator's side. Timezones too (everyone seems to have this expectation mod teams are online 24/7. now that's usually the case for this instance as we have people in a variety of locations so i don't worry too much... but it has bitten us in the ass when things happened on the instance and we were all asleep unable to respond to remote instance concerns).

Amber

@[email protected] @[email protected] Or in a separate reply in this thread if remote admin is following instance A user A, instance B user B and I'm instance C... and I don't follow either A or B? To them the context is crystal clear and to me I have no idea what the dispute was about. It's all about perspective (especially when it comes to even worse cases of this with fragmentation of replies due to most instance software not using reply collections)

RE: https://transfem.social/notes/a0s9cpebp54d00wu

Amber

@[email protected] @[email protected] Just the pure amount of areas where information gets lost and it's assumed we're all operating on the same page with the same information... It's horrible. It's why admins burn out. It's not the root cause of why instances fight over things and have big public disputes, but it certainly isn't helping. It's a miracle we're even able to moderate to this degree, I think most people would have given up if faced with the challenges my team and I face every day.

Jenniferplusplus

@puppygirlhornypost2 @mattly I know this doesn't help right now, but I do plan to address these issues in Letterbook.

Some of that requires design work that's not done yet. Some of it will be necessarily incomplete without spec improvements, but I'm working on that, too.

Permissions, though, has been on the plan since day 1. I'm going to have auditable privilege escalation for moderators, so you can actually review reports you receive. I was shocked to learn other backends *don't* have that.

Amber

@[email protected] @[email protected] I talk about these problems not because I expect immediate solutions but because I hope that aspiring implementations will use it to find better solutions to the problems we face. I hope that I can laugh with people 1-2 years from now and go "haha yeah mod tools when I first started were in the Stone Age. the network was at a turning point where it needed growth to survive but didn’t have the appropriate resources to accommodate growth"