So You Want To Be An Instance Admin

Mastodon and the fediverse are gaining in popularity and awareness, and with it, more people are spinning up their own instances and communities and are looking for guides on how to effectively manage them. Here's my take on it, from what I've learned from running .art. I've been in community moderation and management since the early 2000s starting with moderating AOL forums and chat rooms, have managed online communities of hundreds of thousands of users, as well as doing 'IRL' community work, on and off since then.

This guide is directed at instance admins who plan to run their communities as safe spaces for marginalised people. If you do not plan on your instance being a safe space for marginalised people, then:-

1) Why not 2) Why the fuck not 3) Let me know your instance name so that I can defederate from you

(Seriously – as a community owner you have an obligation to see to the wellbeing of your members. Yes, it's a lot of responsibility, and if you're reading this and thinking 'I'm not going to do that, that sounds like too much work', then you shouldn't be in charge of a community.)

Being the owner/administrator of an online community is HARD. If that community exists as a safe space for marginalised people, the work is even harder. It is not something to enter into lightly; it's a serious task with importance and weight, it will cause you stress, anxiety, headaches, sleepless nights. It is hard and if you already struggle with time and/or spoons, I urge you to think very carefully before embarking on being an instance admin because unless you've got the time and resources (in terms of people helping) to do it, you're not going to do it well – and if you plan on your community being a safe space, you have to do it well, because not doing it well exposes your members to harassment and toxicity that can have severe impacts on their health and mental well-being.

I'm going to be using .art as an example and basis of my experiences and what I've learned. I think we do a reasonable job in providing a safe space and having a diverse moderator team that puts marginalised people's wellbeing first, and while I don't want to say we have zero room for improvement, I'm confident in saying we're a good place to look at if you're starting out and want an idea of how to do things well from the get-go.

Scaling your moderation team

.art has one mod for every 1000 active users, and me. This works because we have a very very strict block list – we block any instances that don't align with our code of conduct (e.g. instances that don't actively moderate hate speech or who federate with instances who host fascism, etc.) which means that the number of reports we get are lower, because our users are exposed to less toxicity.

Obviously every instance will differ in how busy it is and how many reports it has that need handling (not to mention having someone going through the fediblock tag every day entering new domain blocks), so your baseline mod requirement will need to be established by you, but here are some guidelines;

Start early. If you're reading this you're probably not running a single user instance, but an instance that intends on being a community – so you should onboard new mods as a matter of priority right away. Start with a core team of people who you trust, who share your values, and who represent a variety of marginalised voices.
Have all timezones covered. There should be someone around for the full 24h to deal with reports quickly when they happen. Not all reports are urgent – most of them probably won't be – but if something urgent does come up, you should be able to deal with it swiftly. If one of your users is harassing people, you want to shut that down ASAP. Waiting 8 hours for someone to get out of bed is not great when people are being targeted by abuse.
Have your instance's most common languages covered. You can see what these are in Mastodon from the statistics on the admin panel, which show you the top 8 languages used on your instance. Obviously, the more of these you have covered, the better. Make sure your users know that they can get help in their native language, and have people on hand to help you with translation issues. Automatic translators like Google Translate and DeepL will not catch nuances and cannot be relied on to convey tone. Until if/when you can have all of your active languages covered in-house, find people externally who are native speakers and are willing to help you, and keep a list for when you need to call on them for help.
Have a diverse mod team. You should have voices on your mod team that can speak for issues regarding race, gender, orientation, mental health, disability, etc. Strive, as a point of importance, to not have a majority white mod team or a majority cis mod team. The fediverse is hugely diverse and if you're providing a space for that diversity to exist in safety on your instance, you need to have representation for that diversity among the people who help manage your community.
Plan ahead. If you are actively accepting new members and growing your community, you need to have provisions in place to ensure the safety of those new members before they arrive. Doing it afterwards is not good enough. Having more mods is better than not enough and will help reduce the risk of a situation spinning out of control from lack of moderation.

Blocklists

Have a T0 (Tier Zero, meaning 'bare minimum' – the worst of the worst known very very bad instances) blocklist implemented at the very least from the get-go, even if you have to manually add the entries. Find a list from a source you trust, and do your due dilligence when importing. Links below.

Prevention is better than cure, and pre-emptive blocking of known bad instances is essential in keeping your users from getting harassed – and they will get harassed if you leave some doors open that are best left barred, bolted, and padlocked.

Oliphant's T0 blocklist Oliphant's General Blocklist Posts – lots of good info How to sync up blocklist changes from trusted sources

Implementing a T0 blocklist and keeping up with the fediblock tag is the bare minimum. Work on importing/implementing a full blocklist as soon as you can, to cover the bad instances the rest of us have already had the displeasure of discovering. There's absolutely no reason to subject your users to instances that the rest of us have already discovered are bad (and by 'bad' I mean – CSAM, fascism, hate speech, alt-right, neo-nazi, etc.). Be pro-active in your blocking of known bad actors.

Communicate!

Freakin' talk to each other. Communication is vital. Have a place where ALL of your mods can interact together in real-time, be it Discord, Matrix, a Telegram group – whatever works. Not just for resolving disputes and talking about reports, but for venting and supporting each other. You cannot do this alone. It is a huge burden on your mental and emotional health and your mod team should be yours, and each others', support network. You are no good to your community if you've burned out from trying to manage everything by yourself and end up going AWOL. Have at least one designated backup person who can handle reports, fediblocks, and communication, if you need to step away.

Beyond that, spaces exist where fedi admins and mods have convened into chat rooms for the purposes of communication, support, and discussion. Take advantage of these spaces. Find someone who's in one, and get an invite. .art has one in our Discord backrooms for mods and admins of instances who align with our principles and run safe space communities. There are several on Matrix of different sizes. Heck, there's even the official Mastodon Discord where instance admins talk to each other. There are myriad diversities existing in these spaces that can be vital for perspective and insight on resolving issues where your mod team might lack the necessary life experience. Use these spaces.

When you make a mistake

And you will make a mistake, utilise your support network. Determine the people that were harmed from your mistake, listen to what they have to say, listen to them when they tell you what you need to do to fix it, and how you can prevent that mistake from happening again.

You can't please everybody, nor should you try to – if you're a safe space instance you're going to piss off your fair share of fascists, and that's a good thing. Identify the communities you wish to protect, and make their wellbeing in your community paramount. There will always be a sealioning freeze peach Chad in your mentions trying to engage you in a time-wasting debate with the purpose of making you question your decisions. The only people you need to be listening to are the people your community is providing a safe space for. If you do not belong to these marginalised groups yourself, it's all the more vital that you find people who do, and listen to their voices. Take a back seat and let them steer your community in the right direction – as an admin, you are the tool, and you are there to serve your community. If you're white, you should have absolutely zero say in what a safe space for Black people looks like, for example; if you're a white instance admin, and posit your community as a safe space for Black people, your task is to dutifully implement the safety requirements that Black people tell you you need, and not to debate or 'what if' or selectively implement those requirements.

Compensating your team

If your instance has a subscription/donation service for keeping it funded, add on provisions for paying your moderators, especially if they are marginalised, especially-especially if they are BIPOC. (If you don't have a Patreon or anything set up, consider making one just for this. The people on fedi who are able to, are happy to put their money down for the reward of belonging to a safe and protected community.) Make your users aware that they can help support their moderators financially as well as supporting the server costs.

As a guide, on .art, our moderators who accept financial help get between $30 – $50 a month depending on our excess donations at the end of each month, and I've made Patreon goals to reflect increasing increments of support for paying our mods. It's obviously nowhere near fair compensation for time, but it's a start.

Pixie's Pad