cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/6776820

The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.

Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.

👉Moderation Survey HERE👈

Please feel free to comment in this thread, we will do our best to respond to any genuine questions.

We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!

Sincerely, The Sublinks Team

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/8365829

Question: What moderation tools do you find most useful?

Follow up question: Are there any moderation tools you wish existed but don't?

My wish would be some form of content editable by multiple accounts, useful for megathreads or community wikis.

I'm building a PHP SDK for the Lemmy API.

Here is the repo: https://github.com/jgrim/lemmy-sdk Here is the packagist: https://packagist.org/packages/jgrim/lemmy-sdk

It's still in early development. It works; however, it's missing some tests, CI/CD tooling, and examples.

Feel free to use, contribute, or ask questions.

I've decided to keep the first version simple in an effort to get it live ASAP.

I've decided to develop a cloud solution on the domain socialcare.cloud. I'm writing it in PHP using the Laravel framework.

I should be able to get the base features done within a couple of weeks. I've already begun development.

Once the service is running I'll be pursuing self-hosted options. Perhaps, in the original tech stack of Rust/Svlete/Postgres. Distributed software takes a lot more time than self-hosted and I'd like to get live asap.

I'll opensource what I can. For example, there isn't a Lemmy client SDK available for PHP. I created my own and it will be opensource with an MIT license.

I'll report progress as it's made. I hope everyone agrees to my decision to keep it lean and targeted.

So, never thought i would suggest a form of crypto or token, but it struck me that one of the best ways to help people pay for hosting services would be to create a de-centralized crypto token that when awarded to a user it is send on the back end to their instance.

If we put this token on some of the exchanges then people could pay with either real money by buying tokens and gifting/awarding them, or converting other crypto into Fediverse tokens.

We could even use the same blockchain to allow minting of one off or limited run tokens where users can create their own.

Would also be cool if awards attach to the profile and are federated, but with the ability to make tokens private by the user.

Just a thought, because someone wanted to give me gold for a post, and I linked to our donation page, but man it would be easy if they could have just purchased a token and sent it right then and there without having to go through all the different instance donation methods.

Sadly, I am not a programmer so hopefully this idea is worth a shit and one of you smart people takes it and runs.

Hello,

I've been reading over all the feedback provided by the community. This is an update on progress while also asking some questions to the community.

I'm currently working on the Detailed Design of the project. This is a document that serves two purposes:

1. Ensures what I plan to build is what is expected
2. It forces me to think through the project in detail to find any holes early on

While working on this document, I realized it would be great to separate additional contributions the community can make that cannot relate to this project.

I am going to define the following feature sets:

• In the scope of this project
• Which parts must be a core enhancement
• Out of the scope of this project
• Finally, the requests that require significant design decisions today

In-Scope Features

There is a clear set of features that will be included. These are must-haves for this project to be a success.

1. Roles & Responsibilities
   1. The ability to create super admins, moderators of the entire site, single communities, and/or just application reviews.
2. Smart mod queue ranking
   1. The ability to rank local or external posts higher.
   2. The ability to use rank posts by how well the OP behaves (has moderation strides against them already, etc.)
   3. Certain words, phrases, or domains will rank reports higher. These words can be used to also auto-report posts.
3. A way to resolve reports by sending and recording a warning to the user or suspension by time or permanently.
4. Private notes for local moderators on posts, accounts, comments, users, etc.
5. The ability to search & filter the mod log by the user, posts, comment, community, local or remote instance.
6. Statistics to help find:
   1. Overactive users that like, comment, post
   2. Retention
   3. Report details
      1. Open reports
      2. Resolved
      3. Response time
   4. Totals on users, communities, comments, etc.
   5. Likes of posts & comments over time
7. List of posts from users of your community to other communities. For general scanning of busy communities.
8. List of comments from users of your community to other communities. For general scanning of busy communities.

Must be core enhancements

Several requests are changes to the core of Lemmy and cannot be accomplished by an external tool.

1. Restricting content from federated instances from pulling locally. Federation is all or nothing. It would be a terrible user experience for a post to be on the main instance but never able to be pulled locally without some notification that the content broke local rules.
2. Restricting federation in any form.
3. Forcing federated communities and/or instances to moderate your instance rules.
4. Blocking federated users from local communities in any way.

Out of scope

Some features I just cannot fit within this project's scope or help push the need for them to be added to the core. If these are important to you, please, work with the core team to add them.

1. Customer service tasks
   1. Password reset (site handles this)
   2. Changing user account details
2. Federation tools
   1. Most federation-related requests will require major changes to the core and should be done as core contributions.
   2. Limiting which posts show or are hidden from the feed.
3. User tracking across instances.
   1. This feature would require a single instance, a central database to track, and/or enhancements to the federation logic within Lemmy.
   2. This includes preventing certain users from posting in a community.
4. Any bugs with Lemmy

Finally, a design decision

Some features will require some design decisions to be possible. Mostly, the ability for more joint moderation between instances. I'll list the features below:

1. Strike count across instances
2. Risk ranking of users across instances
3. Common SPAM detection
4. Instance frustration detection (lots of strikes against its users, lots of removal of communities, etc.)
5. Shared private notes on users/communities/posts, etc

These features will require some central moderation hub, which brings me back to one of the original questions. Do you want to self-host without central features, or do you want there to be a central site (like mods.socialcare.cloud) where you log in and interface with your instance?

Self-hosting brings additional costs. Some data will need to be stored for this moderation tool and scale depending on your site's traffic. So for site admins, here are the pros and cons of self-hosting versus cloud solution:

For cloud hosting

Pros

1. Simple setup and zero to low cost
2. Better communication between instance mods
3. Quicker development 4. No need to devote development hours to installation scripts, guides, community support, etc.

Cons

2. Admins cannot modify code directly
3. Potential subscription cost (no monetization has been figured out to run the servers/development)

For self-hosting

Pros

1. Admins can directly modify code rather than wait for updates or changes.

Cons

2. Slower to develop
3. Potentially complicated installation
4. Might be less adopted by users

What's next?

I'm working on the Design Doc for what is In-Scope. These features will be built regardless. This will be done by tomorrow's EOD (July 2nd, 2023).

After that, I will break ground on development. The plan is to split some of the development into microservices. This should allow for parallel development for whoever wishes to contribute.

"What can I do?"

Please help me figure out what to do with the core enhancements. Please let me know if anyone wants to take them on and own them. Let me know if you'd prefer I create GitHub issues for the core team. I need you to let me know what you want to do or can do.

Please help me add to this pro/cons list for self-hosted vs. cloud-hosted, and let's decide.

Thanks, jgrim