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Ariadne Conill 🐰's posts Post Back to profile
Ariadne Conill 🐰

inspired by @darius's talk at #fossy24 about the study he and @kissane did about fediverse moderation, i figured i would outline how treehouse moderation works.

so if that does not interest you, feel free to mute this thread.

3 August at 1:38 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
5 comments
Ariadne Conill 🐰

first off: screening new signups has helped us a lot.

when we first launched treehouse mastodon, because we have high profile community members, we attracted trolls basically immediately whose goals were to disrupt operations of the instance.

the most notable incident involved a person who signed up for an account and then immediately uploaded multiple pieces of media which were CSAM.

this actually has wound up going very badly for that person, who has had to cancel his podcast several times because his door has gotten kicked in by law enforcement due to this, and other maladaptive behavior.

first off: screening new signups has helped us a lot.

when we first launched treehouse mastodon, because we have high profile community members, we attracted trolls basically immediately whose goals were to disrupt operations of the instance.

the most notable incident involved a person who signed up for an account and then immediately uploaded multiple pieces of media which were CSAM.

3 August at 1:42 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
Ariadne Conill 🐰

when folks complain about getting crapflooded -- their complaints are real.

as has recently been highlighted -- in the case of BIPOC, these crapflooding trolls tend to flood users with racial slurs or similar.

in the case of non-BIPOC, these crapflooding trolls tend to use other angles of cheap low-effort insults in their crapfloods.

but crapfloods cause users to have a bad experience, regardless of what the flavor is.

we have built custom tooling to deal with various styles of crapflooding attack, by simply hacking automated mitigations into the mastodon codebase. there are a few feature flags on the treehouse mastodon fork to turn on and off those mitigations.

mitigating crapfloods with automation is essential to ensure a moderation team can scale. otherwise the moderation team will spend a lot of time cleaning up crapfloods.

defederating typical sources of crapfloods is also recommended, but we have dealt with trolls who farm accounts on normal instances that wouldn't typically be defederated.

so you really need automation here.

when folks complain about getting crapflooded -- their complaints are real.

as has recently been highlighted -- in the case of BIPOC, these crapflooding trolls tend to flood users with racial slurs or similar.

in the case of non-BIPOC, these crapflooding trolls tend to use other angles of cheap low-effort insults in their crapfloods.

3 August at 1:47 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
Ariadne Conill 🐰

in the case of treehouse specifically, the majority of the treehouse staff have prior experience managing and moderating IRC networks. this, of course, gives us a good understanding of tactics that can be used to mitigate crapfloods.

basically everything that applies to mitigating IRC abuse applies to mitigating fediverse abuse. bucketing and other basic trend analysis techniques provide sufficient signal quality to do automated moderation against.

3 August at 1:50 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
Jacob Lewallen

@ariadne I saw @darius speak at Eyeo in 2019 and can vouch for how inspiring he can be. I immediately left his talk and followed his template for getting a Mastodon instance up and running.

3 August at 1:48 | Open on hachyderm.io
Michael Dexter
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