Rules Memos

Applying local rules to external posts

Some servers attempt to apply their own local rules to posts on other servers. This may create significant difficulties when federating with other servers.

For example, FV15 is a religious community whose members hold strong beliefs about appropriate content. For this community, part of the service they provide to their members is not only ensuring that the posts on the local timeline follow the community values, but also that all posts in their known network are compliant. A further motivation toward their approach comes from how the Fediverse works: they do not want to host copies of posts which violate their policies.

Yeah. Honestly, most moderation is manageable if your users stick to the same rules that everybody else that the server has. If they don’t, that’s when you have most of your issues with moderation.

Proactive and reactive moderation

There are two common approaches toward moderation. One tries to be reactive, only taking action after harm has occured; the other tries to be proactive to reduce the chance of harm in the future.

The proactive approach can be represented in the #FediBlock hashtag, which Mastodon moderators use to share and discuss harmful users and servers with each other.

Rules as signposts

Some Fediverse servers use their rules and community metadata as signals to other communities.

When dealing with external servers, staff have limited information to get a picture of how the server works. The rules can thus be a strong signal of a server’s values. If a post is clearly in violation of its host server’s rules, this can signal that the server staff simply have yet to get around to removing it rather than the alternative narrative that it represents typical content found on the server.

Rules to solicit reports

On Mastodon, the rules API is tied to the reporting feature. People can report posts that violate the rules to the staff on their local server and optionally choose to forward that report on to the post’s originating server.

If server staff deal with posts commonly on large servers, it may make sense to adopt similar rules so they can forward those reports on to the larger server’s staff.

Network integrity

Some staff value upholding the network integrity of the Fediverse. They believe that servers blocking each other breaks the user experience. Instead, they prefer to take actions against people, not entire communities.