The recent discussion of instance admin burnout has got me thinking about how do we create a sustainable model going forward to prevent admins from being over burdened.

The biggest workload for admins is they become the defacto community moderators for every community with inactive mods, inattentive mods, etc.

I imagine this is part of the overloading stress that caused lemm.ee to throw in the towel.

Mandatory Moderation Model

1 - Every community that doesn't follow the following rules get's autolocked
2 - Every community on a instance needs a moderator
3 - Every moderator must be active
4 - The report backlog for a community must not get stale or too old (24h/48h)

Admin's would be moderator managers, and not get involved in user posts, just moderator issues

A - Moderator not following instance TOS
B - Moderator acting in bad faith
C - Unlocking communities when moderators fix the initial issue

What are your thoughts? Would this help larger instances scale better?

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[–] otter@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think this could work well!

As the other comments mentioned, determining activity might not be that easy. Do we actually need point #3? If a community is inactive and doesn't have any content (good or bad), it's not going to affect the admins much. It might end up adding more work for admins if they need to keep adding new mods to communities that don't have much going on. We might also end up with having lots of tiny communities locked, which would discourage people from posting.

I think point #4 takes care of the problem pretty well already. If the mod isn't active enough to resolve the reports within 24-48 hours, then the community could be locked.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I see #3 as good hygiene, but perhaps not necessary - If all the listed moderators are logged out with no active sessions for some amount of time we can deduce the community is totally unmoderated, even if there are no reports. Imagine the typical 2 year old community where the moderator just disappears, no reports so it doesn't need to be actioned, but that does mean if something bad happens then the report will sit around with no attention until it escalates to the admins.

More succinctly - If we know #3 the mods are not active, then its the same as #2 - there is no moderator, nobody is responsible for this community.

[–] xylol@leminal.space 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I guess my worry is I don't use the account I have communities with that often since I prefer to use non mod account for shit commenting, so my mod account is usually not active unless I get an email which thankfully is really rare

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 1 points 3 days ago

Good point - you get emails for reports, then I suppose rule #3 can't be implemented at all, and #4 would be good enough.