(2018-09-01) Lawson Mastodon And The Challenges Of Abuse In A Federated System

Nolan Lawson: Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system. This incident demonstrates that a large-scale harassment attack by motivated actors is not only possible in the fediverse, but is arguably easier than in a centralized system like Twitter or Facebook, where automated tools can help moderators to catch dogpiling as it happens.

For anyone who has actually done Mastodon moderation, this is totally understandable. The interface is good, but for something like 60 reports, even if your goal is to dismiss them on sight, it’s a lot of tedious pointing-and-clicking. There are currently no batch-operation tools in the moderator UI, and the API is incomplete, so it’s not yet possible to write third-party tools on top of it.

Now let’s start talking about solutions....