It occurs to me some of you may have no idea what this is like.
Lemme tell you.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, they all have beaucoup millions of dollars and can spend that on paying full-time moderation staff.
That’s…not happening here.
On top of that, they can afford to build or deploy Minority Report level systems that can flag and do some natural language processing and identify users who might be saying things that should get them banned.
Some of these things might even ban a user pre-emptively if the filters identify something bad enough, and then flag it for moderator review.
There’s none of that here.
Moderators are not watching every conversation of every user on every server for problems.
They are, largely, either going to stumble across problems like any other user, or they are going to respond to reports.
I’ve heard people in the past scoff at this. “I shouldn’t have to file a report,” they will say, in the exasperated tone of someone who wants to speak to the Manager of the Fediverse.
Well, fine, don’t file a report, but your mod doesn’t even know what happened.
Similarly, the time defederate a server is after a report happens, and you get no response. Or a non-response. Or a shitty, entitled, “up in their feelings” response.
You can certainly distance yourself because everyone from a certain server seems “of a kind”.
But there are big servers out there, and they can’t watch all their users, and it’s possible one of those users is a hateful bigot.
While I’d like to say it should be impossible for anyone to face discrimination or racism, it can still happen on those servers.
Mods run off reports. Reports create a record for a user–whether that user is part of your server or not–and your server’s mods can suspend or limit that user, regardless of their server of origin.
Moreover, mods and admins will often reach out directly to mods and admins of other servers to report an abusive user.
Again, this is all driven by reports.
If it’s just a personal grudge, fine, block or mute. But if someone is being actively harmful, the mods (many of whom literally work for free, after their day job) will benefit from you identifying anything they need to be aware of.
Report early, report often. Mods generally only act based on reports.