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?

all 21 comments

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[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 days ago

Problem is that not every community is the same. Nor is every mod.

You start telling to use activity as your metric, you run into trouble because there's a ton of small communities where the mod listed is an alt account to keep moderation and personal use separate to avoid the bullshit.

Back on reddit, I learned real damn fast to not moderate active subs on my main account. Lemmy isn't much different. Mods catch hell, no matter how good they are. Using dedicated moderation accounts to avoid the bullshit, while observing the community from a main account. If the community never needs action, the mod account looks inactive.

For real people, never moderate a big community from your regular account, even on lemmy.

But other than that, it's a solid idea!

[–] ShellMonkey@lemmy.socdojo.com 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I would think this all this is perhaps a personal preference on a given instance, but not practical on a global scale.

If an instance owner wants to accept the risk of a chaotic, unmoderated space on their server so be it. Other instances are quite capable of blocking a comm or defederating if it's an instance wide problem.

There's also the potential to blockade new comms on small instances when I think of it here. If I, as an admin of a single person instance, try and set up a few niche comms for personal interests and they where report-bombed by people just being trolls, there would never be a way to get them off the ground. You would spend all your time responding to reports rather than creating content in order to avoid them being locked.

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 6 points 3 days ago

Yea, this is a very bad idea that will just create even more workload for mods, leading to yet fewer mods as they get tired of having to touch a community just to prevent it being locked.

What will happen is people writing a script just to touch a community on the regular, like the apps that move your mouse so Corp spying apps think you're at your pc.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Probably a petty good idea. But what constitutes inactivity. Just being idle off of the platform or not using the specific instance they purport to moderate?

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

I'd start with the account must login periodically, and the report backlog must be kept under 24h.

So if someone isn't around, for whatever reason, the community gets paused until they come back.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 15 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I'd say under 24h is kinda harsh given I can see small instances get autolocked when the one mod is just on holiday or something for a report about idk, a post being offtopic (for instance)

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, and if someone knows the mod is AFK, they could game it with false reports to lock the community.

The login tokens are long-lived, so that'd be hard to track unless they login from different devices. I don't think the API provides any way to tell the "last activity" of a user aside from the last time they posted/commented.

It's a good idea, but I just don't think Lemmy has the requisite "tracking" to make it work right now.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

In theory since reports are attributable false reports would get someone banned (from the community at least) for report abuse. It's not a perfect proposal, but the bones are here to enforce distributed workflows off the admin's shoulders.

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

In theory since reports are attributable false reports would get someone banned (from the community at least) for report abuse

Yeah, in theory. I guess I was just looking at it from the angle of someone spinning up alts to fire off reports like that and being a dickhead. I used to have a much more charitable outlook, but I've been here 2 years and have had that beat out of me lol.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Indeed, my tolerance for zero-post accounts causing havoc is near zero.

Lemmy sorely needs a reputation system, which could be used for weighted reporting.

This is just the first pass of a idea, its only to mark abandoned communities as abandoned, even if there is significant lag (like when a session token expires) its still a improvement and workload reduction on admins compared to today.

[–] OpticalMoose@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I'd say mods should be able to ban users who serially downvote in a community that they don't contribute to. And more importantly, once banned, the user can't read or vote in that community anymore. Temporary bans would be helpful; a week or two, a month, etc.

Sure, they'll create new accounts. Mods should be able to restrict new accounts until they've built up a decent vote count - we'll call it aura or ambiance or something.

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

100% agreed with you, I think minimum reputation, account age, or participation requirements are a must for lemmy to grow.

Every new community starts as a niche community.

[–] Skavau@lemm.ee 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Yet in the meantime, it can cause communities to lock-up. I would argue a week is more realistic. Plenty of communities are that abandoned.

[–] Elevator7009sAlt@ani.social 2 points 3 days ago

All the communities I mod are niche enough that I don't think every 24 hours is strictly necessary, though I am active enough to hit that requirement. Something big like !games@lemmy.world definitely needs that kind of requirement, but my quiet little communities are probably okay with twice a week, although I do check Lemmy about everyday anyways—more active users tend to be more likely to be mods.

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

I agree its harsh compared to the current default , but if they are not around then its the admins responsibility to moderate spam or abuse in their absence. The solution to someone having a 3 day weekend isn't that the admins get no weekend, its the moderators of a community need to recruit more moderators, or checkin periodically

[–] 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.

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

Maybe when private communities become a thing, instead of getting auto-locked the community just goes private/subscribers only until the backlog is worked through.