✅ Our Moderator Advisory Council and others just completed a personal digital safety workshop with @tallpoppy as we onboard our first cohort of #moderators - providing guidance and concrete advice on preserving personal safety and offering incident support during times of harassment online or off. Fantastic resources!
Thanks to @leigh and the Tall Poppy team for helping us provide this very valuable service to our at-risk moderators and community managers in the Fediverse!
📢 We are thrilled to announce the launch of IFTAS Connect, a new community of practice designed specifically for Fediverse #Moderators
IFTAS Connect aims to provide moderators, community managers and anyone engaged in creating a safer Internet with a wealth of tools, resources, and a supportive network to help them connect, collaborate, and navigate the complexities of federated content moderation.
One of IFTAS’ priorities is to support Fediverse #moderators by creating template documents, training, and best practices guides.
We know there’s no “one size fits all” solution, but we’ve onsistently heard that these will be useful resources. As a first step towards that, IFTAS Advisors @Lillian and @jdp23 are conducting a survey and holding a series of discussion sessions. We welcome your participation!
📝 Very happy to put our DSA Guide for Fediverse Services online today!
We get a lot of questions about the EU's Digital Services Act and the potential impact on Fediverse servers, so we partnered with Tremau - DSA experts - to break down when the law applies, when it doesn't, and practical guidance for Fedi admins who want to meet the requirements.
This is a Moderation-as-a-Service app that can monitor denylists from your trusted sources and automatically update your server.
For now we will use the IFTAS CARIAD database, but future versions will support a server or servers of your choice, popular denylists, or third-party labellers.
Mastodon only for now, but the roadmap includes additional platforms as well as toxic IP addresses and email domains.
Everything you wanted to know about the EU's Digital Services Act and were too afraid to ask.
We partnered with Tremau to take a look and figure out what parts apply to small platform service providers. Compliance may be hard, but we've provided some concrete guidance on how to stay on the right side of this broad regulation.
To follow, additional guidance on age verification requirements, GDPR issues, the UK's Online Safety Act and more.
CARIAD is a "day one" denylist for new admins. We scan a range of high-volume servers and monitor what domain blocks they agree on. Spoiler, it's not much.
Only one domain is blocked by all major providers, and a little over 100 are blocked by more than half.
After manual review we add them to the database for aggregation and construct a very basic denylist alongside our DNI list, using standard labels.
Our moderator community portal will house a library of resources for trust and safety, discussion forums, a sharing space to seek help from your peer moderator community, template documents, and a lot more.
Our staff and workgroups will be first through the door, but we'll be welcoming more community members soon!
@Lillian and @jdp23 kicked off our Moderator Documentation Support project.
This will gather up a range of moderator agreements, moderator codes of conduct, and any and all guidebooks we can find. Then, we will seek to provide baseline templates you can use to onboard new moderators and offer basic training and guidance on how to do the day-to-day tasks.
Jon Pincus joins the IFTAS Advisory Board as an Advisor on Moderator Support.
Jon’s background as a strategist, software engineer, entrepreneur, activist, and privacy advocate adds a broad perspective to our work on privacy, disinformation and safety that will be meaningfully relevant this busy election year.
Lillian Outlaw joins our IFTAS Advisory Board as an Advisor on Moderator Support.
As a licensed clinical social worker with over a decade of experience working with individuals and families from various socio-economic, cultural, and educational backgrounds, Lillian brings a new perspective to our support for volunteer moderators.
In recent years, there has been a significant shift in how government agencies communicate with the public. Social media has become an indispensable tool for agencies to disseminate emergency information, public health alerts, engage with citizens, and provide services. The Fediverse and its most popular component, Mastodon, have emerged as potential alternatives to mainstream social media networks.
Shauna Gordon-McKeon joins our IFTAS Advisory Board as an Advisor on Community & Governance.
With her vast experience in open source development & leading community projects, she's the perfect addition to guide us towards a safer, more inclusive digital world.