This is a very interesting article about the long-term sustainability of the Fediverse for moderators, administrators, and developers. We’ve already had two of our lovely Beehaw admins take breaks to take care of themselves as they experience the burnout associated with maintaining a community, and I think for a lot of use we already know how exhausting it can be to take a center stage position in an online community.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any great starting points for what to do, but at least talking about it is a start.
Good article. I would imagine one large stressor for admins is “how am I supposed to pay for this?” With instances needing to upgrade because of the huge influx of users.
The article suggests a non-profit for mental health support for admins and moderators. While I like the idea, I think we can go further—a non profit to help pay for running instances and paying admin and developer salaries. The names mentioned in the article would make sense for something like this (for instance, Mozilla. Also, how about the EFF?)
I don’t think the Fediverse has a mental health problem. I think people online tend to be terrible, regardless of the platform…
The whole planet has a mental health problem. Was discussing this earlier in another community with a German user.
I don’t think people really realize just badly the pandemic affected peoples mental health and how that impact hasn’t really decreased much at all
I think even before that, there were major issues. The pandemic just made it so we couldn’t ignore them any longer. Which is ridiculous given how much people were acting out. But now everyone is aware of how important it is, because so many were trapped with their own thoughts and/or monotony. Even so, our governments paid lip service and then failed to make meaningful changes. My government cares more about getting people back into the office than making sure mental health care is accessible to everyone.
The pandemic just exposed the lie that in the worst case, the government, or your job, or someone in power, would help you.
There’s not really much “going back” from that realization, especially when we can literally find news articles every day about how another politician is campaigning against us for one thing or another.
Today, for instance, I discovered that Arkansas had passed a law to make it possible to criminally charge librarians if they lend out the “wrong” books to people!
We live in a system that isolates people and makes them fill their lives with long hours of dull work for fear of becoming penniless and homeless, while they watch this crazy consumption led by sociopathic billionaires destroying everything they love about the planet day by day. And then when people are miserable because of these problems, they receive pills and conversation (if they’re lucky enough to be able to afford them) while the material problems continue. It’s no wonder we’re all a bit messed up.
Capitalism is shit. We’re brainwashed to believe that there’s only so much and we have to get as much as can and before everyone else, damn the cost, even if it’s our mental health. I don’t understand how we can’t look at it from the other angle and say, if there’s only so much, let’s protect it. Let’s share what we have so everyone can have fun. Let’s care about everyone and lift everyone up.
I still think it changes the calculus for how it feels moderating an online space when you’re volunteering vs when you’re getting paid for it. The latter can let you emotionally datach yourself from it. The former? It’s an act of love for which you receive hate
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Some people just can’t handle the “anonymity” the internet proves and take every chance to be a dick
Very few moderators on reddit are getting paid anything to moderate subreddits, the key difference is that lemmy is still in the early stages of moderation tools.
If those “moderation tools” means something like the automated blanket moderation with no recourse that’s going on Reddit… we already have that, it’s Reddit and pretty much every other for-profit platform where “some false positives” are acceptable as long as they don’t damage the income sources by offsetting the influx of new users.
I disagree. When you are paid for it you become reliant on it to make ends meet in your life, so you’re more willing to put up with absolute garbage that you shouldn’t have to. This forces people to try to detach from it as a coping mechanism while they fall further down the hole. Paying them won’t change a thing about the mental health issues and will probably make it worse.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t pay them, but we shouldn’t look at it as the fix for this either.
Is there an opportunity here to pay mods and admins of the fediverse? I’m already signed up to donate to beehaw each month. Is there enough demand to have a paid-only subset of instances? I’d rather pay $5-10 a month and have mods get paid than have them burn out or have ads everywhere.
Speaking as someone who ran a set of public forums back in the early days of the internet, the number one thing I can suggest is don’t do it alone.
Alone, you’re one person arguing with hundreds of other people that your opinion is the right one. This burns out anyone but the most narcissistic assholes (I should know, being the latter). With a team, you get to deflect attacks that would be personally directed at you to the overall team while relying on their support to provide a unified front. Bullies generally target single individuals - they rarely go after groups.
This can be hard to build, and it often relies on a third party in the admin role to encourage the creation and unity of the mod team until it gets on its feet, often becoming part of the team in the early phases until it runs well on its own. A minimum of three people is usually what it takes to really make a community thrive cleanly.
Unfortunately, the fragmented nature of the Fediverse makes it difficult to build these kind of teams, as the mods have to be users on the same instance platform, and a small instance with only 20 users can end up with an enormous amount of content and commentary from users across the wider Fediverse. This, of course, ties into @hoodlem 's comment regarding bandwidth costs for instance owners - the speed at which your traffic can scale is exponential, and you need to be prepared for it from both a financial and staffing standpoint.
One solutions that could help would be to have an ActivityPub login standard that would allow logged-in users from one instance to moderate a community on another when given permissions. A cross-platform private messaging standard would help here as well. Of course, both of these functions would have to be encrypted and secured to prevent cross-site attacks, but they could be steps in unifying the Fediverse without centralizing it.
EDIT: as pointed out in the comments, you can mod across instances, but it doesn’t look like you can mod across platforms yet.
One solutions that could help would be to have an ActivityPub login standard that would allow logged-in users from one instance to moderate a community on another when given permissions.
That’s already possible on lemmy. Not sure about kbin.
Unfortunately, the fragmented nature of the Fediverse makes it difficult to build these kind of teams, as the mods have to be users on the same instance
No they don’t. As long as the instances are federated then you can moderate a community on another instance. I’ve set up communities on my home instance for other people to mod and I mod a few lemmy.world ones.
Granted, I don’t run instances of anything yet, but speaking as someone who has been on the Internet for a while, including in moderation capacities…
- Yes, obviously make mental health treatment more accessible, but if it has gotten to the point where it’s needed (as opposed to the equivalent of checkups and maintenance), then things have already gotten out of hand.
- Moderation needs to happen as a team or community, because you can’t take a break if it’s all on you. At that point, problems grow while you try to heal, and you come back to a worse situation than you started with.
- While we should pay moderators for their time, because their time is valuable, that’s also not a solution, just basic respect. People with high-paying jobs burn out, too.
- Long term, though I obviously have no authority or sway in these matters, the idea of “moderation” should probably be replaced by “governance,” because governance carries the connotation of distributed responsibility. The person who decides whether to discipline in a given case isn’t the same person who metes out the discipline. Neither of them decide appeals on the decision, and none of them work without oversight. Also, the expansion of the Fediverse is largely a shift away from feudal governance to more-but-not-totally-democratic governance, which I think is more comprehensible to most people than “the owner of your server (who you’ve never really considered as a person) can’t put up with your crap anymore and is pulling the plug.”
That’s unfortunately not complete or a useful policy proposal, but hopefully those off-the-cuff ideas will spur something more worthwhile.
Yes, obviously make mental health treatment more accessible, but if it has gotten to the point where it’s needed (as opposed to the equivalent of checkups and maintenance), then things have already gotten out of hand.
While I agree with this on principle - at this moment in time - I don’t know any admin of any of the big instances which does not struggle with balancing their admin responsibilities and living.
While we should pay moderators for their time, because their time is valuable, that’s also not a solution, just basic respect. People with high-paying jobs burn out, too.
When it is a job, people can quit. When it is a labour of love, that is a lot more difficult. As the model doesn’t give nearly enough money for people to be financially compensated, the only ones who can stay are those doing it as a labour of love. These people probably need to work because they need to live. This makes self-control of the time invested a lot harder, I think. People are more likely to drive themselves to burn out with these conditions in place.
On the former, yes, I’m definitely thinking about sustainability in the long term, not the current crisis. It might be too late to fix the current situation, at least in the sense of making it so that current large-instance owners can continue to manage everything alone.
And on the latter, kind of. When it’s a job, then people also rely on the income. One of the big problems with most economies in general is that, if someone feels bad about your current job - overwhelmed, depressed, or otherwise stressed - then they’re not in a good position to find the next opportunity. They don’t want to take more hours out of the day, and that stress shows through on job applications. And someone might want to solve that by paying them less, so that they have other jobs, but that throws it back into the “labor of love” column.
That’s why I make a big deal about distributing the work across a group or community. Paid or not (but ideally paid), it’s far easier to walk away if the “bus factor” is high enough that the job can afford to lose an individual or two for a few weeks and replace them if they leave permanently.
