Gregory's Server
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.
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.