Okay, so, I've just done a review of the #moderation features in both #Lemmy and #kbin, thanks to @stux and @ruud

I've written up a fuller report on the IFTAS matrix, but the tl;dr is: if you care about user safety, do not deploy either of these.

They do not feature comprehensive or well built moderation tools, and you will not be able to effectively moderate instances running this software.

You are better off waiting to deploy these once they mature more.

@feditips

Like, if you're totally fine with not being able to effectively moderate a server you operate, then by all means, test out #kbin and #lemmy, but encouraging folks to use either en-mass as if they're anywhere near the calibre of Mastodon or Pixelfed* then you're in for a very very bad time.

Alpha software does need alpha users to test and provide feedback, but we should be VERY careful recommending alpha software to mainstream massive audiences as an alternative to $centralisedPlatform.

@thisismissem How hard would it be to make an easy to plugin moderation tool for server admins that would work across ActivityPub based services?

I was thinking of a way to have another program monitor the incoming and outgoing posts and moderate that directly. Then just have the program run alongside the main service.

Note: I still need to read the ActivityPub specs in full so this could be a pipe dream.

@Zach777 it'd be a lot of work! But, I'm getting closer towards seeing this as a must-have for the future of the fediverse.

I’m trying to find ways I can fund that work, as I've a reasonably good idea of what needs to be built, how it should work, etc.

@thisismissem I really want to get into coding work for fediverse related software.

Designing something that works for any service seems like a good thing to look into. Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin use ActivityPub mostly so I planned on looking into that protocol first.

Although Hubzilla uses several protocols and some other services probably do too. Not sure how to design a tool for all of them.

@Zach777 right, but you'll still need to do work in each of these projects.. ActivityPub is just a small (but important) part of these software services.

So, for instance, you could write a proxy that parses ActivityPub requests, and then does something with just the Flag activities, but that'd only give you a small snippet of the data needed for moderation, and you'd still need to integrate software-specific APIs to perform the actual moderation action.

@thisismissem I figured. My original thought was to make a sort of main stream reader that would have plugins to interface with the various services it would be used for.