Convener: Scott Jenson (@scottjenson@social.coop)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• Damon (@damon@social.wedistribute.org)
• Jeremiah Lee (@Jeremiah@alpaca.gold)
• Alexis (@alexisbushnell@toot.wales)
• Seth Goldstein (@phillycodehound@indieweb.social)
• Julian Fietkau (@julian@fietkau.social)
• James Marshall (@jamesmarshall@sfba.social)
• Evan Prodromou (@evan@cosocial.ca>)
• Jaz-Michael King (@jaz@mastodon.iftas.org)
• Emelia Smith (@thisismissem@hachyderm.io)
• David Rowley
• Sascha Foerster( @Sascha@Bonn.social)

Website: https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-trust-and-safety

Notes

Tessler’s Law https://lawsofux.com/teslers-law/

• Paraphrased: The level of complexity is constant. The question is if it’s the user’s problem or not to deal with.

So much happens at that API Level

QT Posts were a disaster with Twitter/X

Scott: Example of quote posts in Mastodon being better than what Twitter did

• You can remove yourself from a bad quote post. Added to API to give people more control. You can make people look stupid if you pull yourself from a quote post.

• Evan: Original intent of ActivityPub is that the author of the original post has control over the collection of replies so that bad replies won’t be hosted by original author’s server. Anyone can say what they want, but that might not be redistributed by the original author’s server.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-28-2024-anti-toxicity-features

Emelia: Content warnings were not in the protocol originally, but it’s a good feature. Same with marking content as sensitive, from Mastodon and then ActivityPub misc. Reply control policies from GoToSocial. Many areas left to the implementor. Category of reported post not sent with the sent report to other server. There’s a need to improve this.

Emelia: ActivityPub Trust and Safety Taskforce Initial Report (WIP): https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-trust-and-safety/initial-report/

• Meetings every two weeks and they’re open for people to attend. Not super technical either, welcome for people to participate.

Have a number of holes that need to be patched: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/federation/interaction_policy/

But also underspecified and not specified on purpose by devs.

New AP services pop up from time-to-time that don’t do anything and lots of bad stuff gets sucked in.

Scott: What are the next 2 things we should fix?

James: 2 features ppl want in regards to harrassment is - shared block lists and reply controls.

Scott: Upset about how people don’t understand the visiablity controls

Emelia: Go To Social has reply controls that are well implimented. Inspired by Claire’s ideation work for Mastodon.

• https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/federation/interaction_policy/

Emelia: Take what Go To Social controls and make it into a specification

Jaz: All activity pub installs should be not federated at install. But then have a guide to warn people on what federation means and how to control it. Have a smart way to turn on federation. Universal blocklist when federation starts and make it an option to make it informed. Curate this for people more. Jaz: Most fediverse servers have a flagship server. Ship their blocklists to help the other community server instances.

Sascha: Likes the idea of keeping it more understandable what each filter does. Unlisted explain well.

Emelia: Federation management –> doesn’t have to be federated with all or not at all. But federate selectively. Like 1 degree away from account. Organically grow.

• Moving beyond the false dichotomy of federation management: https://writings.thisismissem.social/moving-beyond-the-false-dichotomy-for-federation-management/

Federation by default is dangerous.

Emelia: Since we’ve had either fully open or fully closed it makes it tough. Should be a spectrum not a binary.

Scott: Challenge of picking a community server because they all look the same. The fact that I can move is not encouraging. Who wants to move? Is there an opportunity for social engineering, something like the Covenant 2.0?

• https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
• Jaz: Covenant 2.0 has been mooted at least twice, would be happy to see this move forwarded

Emelia: Island networks, oliphant experimenting with this, they have a segregated border to the rest of the fediverse.

• https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/the-archipelago-an-island-network-in-practice

Emelia: “A covenant is only as good as it is enforced.”

Jaz: We’ve come very far and we should be proud. But now we’re at an inflection point. Need to start condifying the findings and best practices back into the community so we “all” agree. One way in and little community governance.

• “Where’s the evidence” « always comes up
• Diversity of users. Some people want super confined, close group. Some want full public broadcast.
• Need a common best practice of governance structures. Working collectively as an ecosystem. Need the ability to reach decisions.
• https://www.prosocialdesign.org/

Language note: Avoiding “blacklist”/“whitelist”. Using “blocklist”, “allowlist”.

Sascha: Parental controls to have parent control of accounts with options for children.

• Prior art: US’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act requirements

Sascha: Need to teach people the role of money’s necessity to support the instance, the software its running, make it easy to provide financial support. People use the fediverse software like they do the Big Tech software that’s free because of selling attention / individually targetted ads.

Jeremiah: See the session notes from yesterday's session on sustainable funding, as well as several other prior Fediforums

Damon: Cultural considerations to paying. “No algorithms” objection, but it’s going to take algorithms to simplify things. Quote post concerns from minorities don’t seem to have been addressed.

(unnamed): Mekka saying Black community needs quote posts for calling out bad behavior. The feedback was useful for prioritizing its development by Mastodon.

Damon: Black women’s experience of joining a Mastodon server, being harassed, and then other people denying their experiences because they did not see it. Proposes ridding of quote posts because it’s been used as an abuse vector and finding another solution.

Emelia: New features for managing harassment: can stop notifications (doesn’t stop them, but stops being made aware of the activity), accounts < 7 days old and from new servers don’t create notifications.

• Protocol doesn’t have way to edit/change the audience of a post/thread. Someone replies to a public post with followers only, which is an abuse vector because the abuse is then less public. May need to have audience parity of reply to the original post’s audience.

• Mastodon should track the replies collection so that it could do what Evan referenced earlier, allow the curation of the replies hosted/“approved” by the original author.

Sascha: inability as admin to anotate/label third party content on my service (eg add a CW)

Emelia: THis is being worked on in SWICG T&S WG. There is a future feature in Masotdon to mark a account as suspsended (true/false) which cou

• Annotate any content and distribute those annotations, advisories, recommendations

Emelia: Funding is the major issue for the speed of development on the SWICG Trust & Safety taskforce work. Grant applications take much time and then are not guaranteed an outcome.