The fediverse offers an opportunity to rethink how trust and safety works in social media. In a decentralized environment, creating safe and welcoming places relies on community moderation, transparent governance, and innovation in tooling. No longer is one company making — and enforcing — its own rules. It’s a collective responsibility.

Samantha Lai, senior research analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Jaz-Michael King, the executive director of IFTAS, are here to explain how. Samantha co-authored a seminal paper, “Securing Federated Platforms: Collective Risks and Responses,” along with Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth. Jaz runs IFTAS, which offers trust and safety support for volunteer content moderators, community managers, admins and more. The two often collaborate and bring perspectives from the policy and operational sides.

Highlights of this conversation:

01:00 Insights from a moderation event involving neo Nazis 06:05 Average stint of moderators in the fediverse right now 08:00 Shortcomings of Fediblock 11:03 Communities sharing threat intelligence 12:10 IFTAS Connect 14:22 Building up trust and safety against risks on federated services 17:30 IFTAS’s role, resources and tooling; shared list approach 23:33 A fascinating insight into decentralized governance 24:50 Decentralized moderation rules and policies, and added complexities 30:12 Local angle on moderation 31:51 Scaling moderation with LLMs, AI-based tools 37:23 Massive gap with tooling in the fediverse 38:00 IFTAS’s three main goals 40:17 Opinions on Bluesky’s composable moderation 42:42 Concerns during a major election year 48:33 Bluesky’s custom feeds 49:50 “Big Social” algorithms in contrast to fediverse 53:40 “Team Fediverse” and collective collaboration

Mentioned in this episode:

IFTAS Connect - https://connect.iftas.org/ Samantha and Yoel Roth’s paper for Journal of Online Trust and Safety - https://www.tsjournal.org/index.php/jots/article/view/171 Bluesky composable moderation https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

🔎 You can find Samantha at @samlai.bsky.social and Jaz at @jaz@mastodon.iftas.org

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon at @mike@flipboard.social or via his Flipboard federated account, where you can see what he’s curating on Flipboard in the fediverse, at @mike@flipboard.com

💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here: http://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave