Will Admins Cope? Decentralized Moderation in the Fediverse

TL;DR

This paper investigates the moderation challenges faced by administrators in the decentralized Fediverse social networks, analyzing their strategies and proposing a semi-automated tool to reduce moderation overhead.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of moderation overhead in the Fediverse and introduces WatchGen, a tool designed to assist administrators in managing their workload.

Findings

Administrators on larger instances face resource constraints.

Diverse moderation strategies are employed across instances.

WatchGen helps semi-automate moderation tasks.

Abstract

As an alternative to Twitter and other centralized social networks, the Fediverse is growing in popularity. The recent, and polemical, takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk has exacerbated this trend. The Fediverse includes a growing number of decentralized social networks, such as Pleroma or Mastodon, that share the same subscription protocol (ActivityPub). Each of these decentralized social networks is composed of independent instances that are run by different administrators. Users, however, can interact with other users across the Fediverse regardless of the instance they are signed up to. The growing user base of the Fediverse creates key challenges for the administrators, who may experience a growing burden. In this paper, we explore how large that overhead is, and whether there are solutions to alleviate the burden. We study the overhead of moderation on the administrators. We observe a diversity of administrator strategies, with evidence that administrators on larger instances struggle to find sufficient resources. We then propose a tool, WatchGen, to semi-automate the process.