I think QoL tools for moderators need to become more of a Fediverse priority. This burns people out. Key moderators of communities quit and communities become abandoned.
Ideas :
- Automatic removal option to remove posts and/or comments for specific keywords. This would be most useful for automatically removing posts and comments when people slur. Piefed already has a keyword filter for visibility. This could be expanded to community settings. Have it also fire-off a report to the moderators when someone triggers it.
- Automatic URL removal. Allow communities to blacklist specific urls. Useful for politics or news communities that want to negate sources known for misinformation.
- Automatic removal for repeat URL posting. Very useful for politics or news communities to prevent double-posting.
- Make it so a community can set itself up to only accept text posts, video posts, or image posts. This should prevent tedious janitorial cleanup for communities that only allow links, or text posts (the most common two).
- Post Delay Restrictions. Some communities, perhaps not many, might be interested in posting cooldowns for users. So you can only post 1 post every hour, or 2 posts every hour - or whatever the chosen limit is. This would help negate spammers and over-enthusiastic posters flooding a topical community.
- Post Formatting Requirements. This one could be trickier and more effort than most of the others, but setting conditions for the formatting of new posts would be useful.
Now, not all communities would make use or have any need to make use of all of these - but many would to varying degrees - and it would help them.
I think going down this road is important to prevent moderators burning out over the drudgery of moderating communities.
If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.
By now I've written four bots using the lemmy API.
Any one of your ideas is doable in a weekend if I ever feel the need for a modding bot. But I haven't. Several communities and instances already have them.
Honestly that's how it should be. Modding can have such diverse needs depending on community that just implementing every possible eventuality into lemmy itself, is a huge ask.
Any large community on discord, reddit and other platforms, make extensive use of automod bots. Because using the API, you can write bots that do whatever you can think of.
Modding is volunteer work, but it is work.
If you need tools, find them. If they don't exist, create them. If you don't have the skills or time, then don't volunteer.
Asking some volunteers to do more than they already are because you think they are letting down another set of volunteers just risks burning out a different set of volunteers.
In Skavau's defense, they aren't a programmer, but are probably one of the most active people on piefed's chat server/matrix room as well as the codeberg repo providing ideas and feedback. So they are volunteering time that way (in addition to being site staff for piefed.social).
Some of the ideas in this post are good imo, but are currently not possible yet using the piefed api due to it being much less complete compared to lemmy's. So, it helps us figure out prioritization on what kinds of endpoints would be useful to flesh out next.
Indeed.
My core point is that when it comes to moderation, I would prioritize actual mod actions (such as a mod being able to mark posts nsfw instead of deleting them outright) and API support for those actions, over built-in automod features.
Once you have an API, anyone with the skills can implement whatever automation they need.
After that, I would priotize a bunch of other things, too, before ever coming back around to built-in automod features.
There are a lot of people who make excellent mods who are not programmers. It's already a small enough pool that requiring a particular skill only further narrows the pool. It also has a secondary effect that good mods may be unwilling to take on larger communities, or additional responsibilities.
If we want better moderation, the fediverse has to become more friendly to non technical people.
That's not what I'm saying.
Obviously not everyone needs to code. Once I write a bot, it could potentially be used by anyone.
Only a small percentage of mods need to also be developers. But since that group isn't big enough yet, the solution is growth.
Not asking the platform devs to do even more. They too, are volunteers.
Fair, thanks for the clarification.
To be clear, I'm not thinking about Lemmy here specifically. But in any case, however its done - either via the settings, or an easy to access official or officially endorsed mod-bot - access and knowledge to and of these tools should be easy and well-known for community owners.
Not every would-be moderator of a community has the skills or knowhow to make and/or host these things. Even Reddit now, at its size, lacks some capable tools not consistently covered in automod tools.
I'm not against any of that.
What I disagree with is that this is a priority. It's a nice-to-have.
Once mod actions are supported, and an API exists, any imaginable automation can be implemented by anyone with the impetus to do so.
As such, the priority of further integration drops drastically and platform developer attention can and should move elsewhere.
Mod tools are best created by the people who use them. Even better when they are created for the needs of a specific community. As such, more advanced features should be deferred until later.
Once communities grow large enough that there are a significant number of moderator-developers around, it might be worth creating a generic bot that can be configured as needed. (As has happened with reddit, discord, etc.)
Asking for these tools before then, is inefficient, because the people who ideally should be working on them, haven't shown up yet, and the platform developers time is better spent on other things.
Well I'm thinking in terms of how to 'shore up' the fediverse, so to speak - to make it able to cope with potential future growth. I do think all of the examples in my OP that I've given are pretty general and one or more of them would be implemented by most communities the moment they were able to do so.