A new page in the Running Mastodon section about cultural expectations.

[egypturnash]

As existing instances fill up and people coming over from Twitter stand up new instances, I think it is becoming important to educate these new admins in unwritten rules of the Mastodon section of the Fediverse such as “cw your politics and other potentially-stress-inducing topics”. In the absence of any guidance on this people are just assuming everything runs like Twitter, with messy consequences when, say, a journalist with a lot of Twitter followers suddenly drops a few thousand excited journalists onto the Fediverse with no idea that they are about to be drowned in people screaming at them to CW their stuff and calling for mass defederation.

I think something about the social part of running an instance, and the expectations other admins will have of you, belongs near the top of the Running Mastodon docs, with a reminder to go back and look at it in the “setting up your instance” section.

[egypturnash]

What are these expectations aside from “cw’s exist and are strongly suggested for some topics”? That’s the one fresh in my mind right now. I know there’s others but I just got out of bed and looked over yesterday’s mastoadmin drama and had this thought.

[egypturnash]

Also perhaps we should look at the new instance setup flow, and the default rules - can we populate the rules of a new instance, and make a new admin check them out, so that they know there are some cultural norms. That would super great but just getting a couple mentions of the existing culture into the guides someone is reading because they look like the absolute shortest path to setting up a new node of the People's Glorious Social Network would be great too.

[egypturnash]

"welcome to the Holy Order Of Social Plumbers, here's a few hashtags you might want to pin into a column or three so you can stay aware of the general feelings of the admin hivemind: MastoAdmin - general admin chat; FediBlock - who's in danger of defederation today, and why? - OtherTagsEgyptHasntSeenYet - there's probably several others that are important"

stoned artist me is now thinking of a little comic where a cute elephant priest explains a few things to you, we will see if sober artist me agrees with this :)

[TatharNuar]

What are these expectations aside from “cw’s exist and are strongly suggested for some topics”? That’s the one fresh in my mind right now. I know there’s others but I just got out of bed and looked over yesterday’s mastoadmin drama and had this thought.

I'd add some things like "the behavior of your instance's users reflects upon your instance's reputation" and "other instances are likely to silence or suspend your instance if the way you run your instance is incompatible with their needs."

[KitKat31337]

After just going through a docker deployment and not having any great documentation available, I plan to pr a docker install guide. I should add some things from here to it, or at least link to this issue.

[TatharNuar]

Here's another one, but I wrote it for new users in mind more than new admins, so it'll need some revision.

"Public posts are more public on Mastodon than they would be on Twitter. They show up on everyone's local and federated feeds, even if they're not following you. Content warnings for certain topics may be required or expected on public posts even if they would be unnecessary or inappropriate for unlisted or private posts. Always include specific CWs on public posts for discussions of topics likely to overwhelm others' feeds, such as politics, news, or long posts in general."

I would also include examples like racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, but there's been a big debate today over whether posters should be expected to CW those topics at all when talking about their lived experiences.

[twitchy-ears]

I think to summarise things I've been thinking about this:

1. CW exist and should be applied to stressful topics and a number of other things, this is important if you want your posts to circulate because people are less likely to boost posts without CW and if your posts without CW get boosted into a lot of instances then people will block your instance and eventually raise a #FediBlock for you.

Common Content Warnings include (based on some script based probing of my instance, not ordered by frequency I found):

[country-code]pol (e.g. UKPol, USPol, etc politics about that country) [country-name] politics (e.g. uk politics) politics (just in general) racism mh, mental health ec. eye contact food alcohol, alc drugs ph, physical health, health, illness medicine needles covid violence gore meta (discussion of the Fediverse) selfie death lewd/nsfw religion spoilers transphobia homophobia disability ableism Ukraine family autism caps (posts that have long blocks of all caps) work abuse nazis money long (just a long post with a lot of stuff) twitter (I guess discussion of twitter? I'm honestly not sure what happens under this tag) fediblock (discussion of blocking/defederating from instances) mastoadmin (discussion of running mastodon)

Many are also sometimes modified with + for good news but more frequently - for bad news often formatted something like this: ukpol+ (positive/good news) ukpol- (negative/bad news) ukpol - (negative/bad news) ukpol (-) (negative/bad news)

2. if your members don't like clicking the expand button tell them to use: Preferences -> "Always expand posts marked with content warnings" so you don't have to see them.

3. Members of your instances behaviour is likely to reflect on the instance as a whole, if you don't deal with problem users your instance may get a rep, and that rep will apply to you as the figure-head of it, and how you deal with this will influence if your instance has a #fediblock circulated for it.

[SaphireLattice]

That quite a long list, and I feel like it would be better be summarized in general for each broad category and then given examples... And generally described overall as, perhaps, "CW should be put on posts that are likely to cause distress to people who are not directly interested in the topic of it, or if the post is inappropriate for viewing in public"?

[twitchy-ears]

That quite a long list, and I feel like it would be better be summarized in general for each broad category and then given examples... And generally described overall as, perhaps, "CW should be put on posts that are likely to cause distress to people who are not directly interested in the topic of it, or if the post is inappropriate for viewing in public"?

Oh sure, I was literally just dumping stuff from surveying my own instance by script and pulling out ones I've seen over time, if I was going to put them in actual documentation I'd probably group them up because I think they'd make sense and be pretty readable under categories like "common triggers", "bigotry", "physical/mental health", "news/events/politics", etc.

I knocked up a quick script to survey these from unlisted/public statuses my instance knows about and basically picked out the ones I'd seen for a long time that had more than about 50 occurrences (I'm not on a big instance) to avoid catching anything to rare/personal, I'm wondering if its worth trying to pool some common "top 100 content-warning/spoiler tags" collections to try and survey what actually common ones are in use across the fedi instead of just what's common in my view?

Script here (I guess warning if you run it on a really big database its quite likely to choke up resources its very very simple okay): https://github.com/twitchy-ears/mastodon-utils/blob/main/bin/dump-spoilers.sh

I'd suggest talking it over with mods/your users before doing this kind of surveying and also any suggestions on ways we could merge this data to look for commonalities?

[egypturnash]

Getting some actual stats on this is gonna be great for orienting new admins. Thank you @twitchy-ears, I owe you a couple of drinks if we're ever in the same city now. :)

I would bet money that all the variants of "politics" are the most common but I think a sidebar with the top dozen or so other cw's would be a great thing to introduce new admins to; these are some of the things we have found it very useful to give people that extra bit of distance from across a lot of the Mastodon parts of the Fediverse, what other things might your community in particular want to consider normalizing CWs for?

[egypturnash]

@TatharNuar raised some good points over on Masto about instance size and the way you pretty much have to silence anything over ~10k if you want fedi to be at all legible. I feel there may be something worth saying about the way the feeling of an instance changes as it grows. Where does the Local timeline stop being legible? I gotta go ask on mastoadmin, all I know is that mine's still usable.

[TatharNuar]

I also think that any discussion of expected content warnings should mention ways that a post's visibility setting can affect which topics present need a CW. Anything visible to local and federated feeds (meaning people who don't follow your instance's users will see their posts on the federated feed) will generally have a longer list of mandatory or expected CWs than anything unlisted or for followers only. To pick on an example from recent events, other instances may expect you to enforce a CW on your users' public posts for news, journalism, or politics even if you don't require such a CW for unlisted posts.

The CWs exist to enable discussion of sensitive or overwhelming topics on the readers' terms with informed consent. Following an account can sometimes imply consent to see the content that account generally posts. If someone runs an account for posting pictures of their pet snake, they may be expected to include a CW for the snake on posts visible beyond their followers, but not necessarily be required to include the CW on posts visible to followers only. [As an aside, I thought I remembered Mastodon having a user setting to include a default list of CWs for all posts, but I can't find it.]

[twitchy-ears]

Anyway much fun as surveys are they only show us a snapshot of a chunk of the fedi not the whole thing, if I was going to try and write something short and useful that tried to balance up the different views and perspectives I've seen it may look something like this:

(Warning I'm writing this while working and I'm tired and I'm almost certainly going to write something really badly worded and shitty, please let me know if you spot anything like that)

---

Welcome to being a fresh instance admin

Here are some things to think about:

1. You should try and pay attention to #MastoAdmin tagged posts because these are instance admins chatting amongst themselves or asking for help, it can give you valuable tips and you can help your fellow admins out or ask for help.

2. You should try and pay attention to #FediBlock tagged posts because these are circulating suggestions of problem instances that are usually producing bigotry, trolling, and general problems in the wider Fediverse. Your choice on blocking is your own.

3. It should be noted that behaviour of members of the instance will tend to reflect on the instance itself and its reputation, and as an instance administrator you are liable to be seen as a figurehead or the point of contact for that instance. If enough friction arises between your instance and others people may want to talk to you as the point of contact about the posts coming from your instance and the behaviour of your members try and be polite when dealing with other instance admins and expect them to try and be polite with you. However #FediBlock posts should probably only arise if your instance is producing active bigotry or is seen as a wider threat to the Fediverse for various reasons (data scraping, malicious behaviour, being a cop, etc).

4. Try and watch for announcements of upgrades to Mastodon to keep up to date for security reasons. If you make a github account and visit https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon you can click "Watch" (the eye icon) and you will be emailed whenever a new release comes out.

5. Guides like https://runyourown.social/ give some good advice on keeping the internal social culture of your instance going and managing disputes that arise internally. As an instance admin you will occasionally be asked to investigate reports coming from outside your instance about behaviour on it as well as discussion with other admins try to be polite to them, expect them to be polite back.

6. The default rules setup on a mastodon instance are [I actually don't know] but you should think about setting up your own rules/server information to try and encourage the kind of culture you want to see there, and help you fairly arbitrate any disputes. Also try and greet new members and watch your Local timeline to help chat to people and encourage the kinds of behaviours you would like to see become your instance culture. Admins, mods, and all your members are part of keeping instances running and encouraging and creating the culture there.

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Content Warnings:

Content Warnings (CW) are frequently used on much of the Fediverse for a number of reasons that depend upon that instances culture and also the culture of instances it frequently interacts with, they are essentially a regional cultural behaviour.

Mostly they are used to give people browsing a warning for a number of stressful topics, some that are not suitable for viewing in public, but also for social politeness of folding up long posts under essentially a subject line, those that may not be especially interesting to many of your followers, spoilers, etc.

Encouraging your members to apply CW to posts will help them circulate amongst the wider Fediverse because many people are more likely to follow your members and boost/promote/repost something using CW (knowing that they won't know exactly who's timelines it will end up in).

If your instance or account frequently posts in ways that would have CW applied to them in much of the Fediverse then you may choose not too (because that is the kind of posts you make frequently) however it may be considered polite to indicate this in your profile, pinned posts, or just the whole instance information (i.e. that you do not CW for X). This may limit the accounts that interact with your instance/account or the ways they interact with it, as they may not want such posts appearing on their own feeds without a content warning, or may not want to boost such posts into peoples feeds who would expect a content warning, giving fair warning for doing this enables them to choose to follow your accounts or not based on their own preferences for their feed.

If your members don't like clicking the expand button tell them to use: Preferences -> "Always expand posts marked with content warnings" so you don't have to see them because they'll be always expanded but encourage them to apply CWs still.

In contrast on many parts of the Fediverse it is also encouraged to use CW - but if a marginalised person who is talking about their experience chooses not too - it can be seen as bad form for you on another instance to police their behaviour. Their instance culture is not your own.

As an instance admin encourage your members to engage in non-confrontational means of dealing with posts without a CW that they feel should have one: they can simply scroll past it without engaging, use time limited or permanent filtering to hide such topics (Upcoming in version 4.0.0+ filter to add CW), mute the user who posted it temporarily or permanently, unfollow them, block that user (if their posts are being boosted by others), or block that users whole instance - and they can do all of this without needing the input of an admin either on their own instance or the remote one. (https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moderating/ has all the details)

Common Content-Warnings include (but remember these are not universal or always required in every situation)

Stressful events/politics are usually under: [country-code]pol, "[country-name] pol", or just politics, Ukraine (as an example of an ongoing conflict and long running series of news events) Common triggers: ec, eye contact ; food ; alcohol, alc ; drugs ; death ; violence ; gore ; family ; money ; religion ; abuse ; needles ; caps, gross, blood, police Bigotry: nazis ; extremism ; racism ; transphobia ; homophobia ; ableism Health related: mh, mental health ; ph, physical health, health, illness ; covid, covid-19, coronavirus, pandemic Courtesy: long ; unfriendly for screenreaders ; spoilers ; lewd, nsfw, kink, sex ; meta ; fediblock ; mastoadmin ; work ; selfie ; wordle ; shitpost

Sometimes people just put what their post is about, like a subject line e.g. tech, code, languages, eurovision song contest, bugs, brexit, gender, life update, question, books

Sometimes CW tags will have + for positive or - for negative appended, this is (like everything else to do with CW) not universal.

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Hash tags:

Please encourage your users to use both CW and #HashTags. At the minute there is (I believe) a bug that #HashTags should be in the body of the post, not in the CW line.

For accessibility purposes hash tags should be in what's called "PascalCase" or "camelCase" where the start of each word is a fresh capital letter, this will help screen readers pronounce it usefully. For example: the words posts about the cats of mastodon should be #CatsOfMastodon instead of #catsofmastodon.

Much like CW hashtags usage will depend upon where you are in the Fediverse. However most CW from the common list above also double as hashtags and will help people who want to talk about those topics, or avoid those topics, either find them or filter them respectively.

Encouraging your members to tag their posts with things like "#USPol #News #Vote #Election2022" for example will help people find or avoid that post if they want to find/avoid discussion of an election going on in the US in 2022, but specific hashtags that arise for each situation will be variable and you'll work it out by watching the timelines and the trending hashtags.

---

(Right, well er... that's some words.

Obviously that list of CW is purely based on my own particular view of the fedi so its far faaaaaaarrrr from Universal. Also having read this back I'm feeling very unqualified to try and put together anything which tries to give a summary of CW use in a wider context beyond "Some people use these things, some people don't but as a fresh instance admin try and ask your users to do so especially if they're producing a lot of posts and links about news/politics/violence/stressful stuff - on the other hand understand that sometimes people don't do it or don't always do it, and encourage your own members to learn about the filtering tools available for their feeds and also remember you can silence an instance to keep the whole thing from your own instances Federated view without blocking it outright" which is probably a shorter summary of the whole situation but maybe misses some examples and nuance.

Also I had a quick stats check and it looks like about 11% of my known statuses are CW'd at all, so its about 1/10th of the posts from my corner of the fedi)

[egypturnash]

oh god thank you @twitchy-ears I was thinking "I need to write a first draft of this" when I got up and now instead I get to fire up git, grab the docs, and start making a new file that I can stick this into and do a second draft.

[egypturnash]

oh geez the docs are actually a separate repo from joinmastodon, whoops, also they are thoroughly impenetrable as to where to add a new file, guess I'm off to the discord to ask for some pointers :)

[trwnh]

@egypturnash content is managed in the content/ directory, btw -- it should be pretty straightforward tree structure from there, e.g. content/en/admin/[some new page here].md

[egypturnash]

thanks, @trwnh!

I might be about to abandon this because the response to me asking for pointers in the discord was "garg has now decreed that cw's are not a thing we are allowed to bitch about to the twitter horde", I have enough other things on my plate right now to make me not want to bother fighting for trying to give new admins a heads-up on what the job involves.

[twitchy-ears]

I mean that was one reason I was trying to give the "its nuanced and complicated depending on where you are in the fedi" and give actual reasoning behind the different ways I've seen it applied on different instances and the fallout of applying it like that.

But also yeah unsure if worth the fight. May be worth publishing as a blog somewhere if we can gather up some more useful tips for fresh admins.

[egypturnash]

yeah, I am still definitely thinking of throwing together a cute little comic going “hello welcome to being a fedi admin” and leaning on this discussion for the script :)

On Nov 11, 2022, at 12:29 PM, twitchy-ears @.***> wrote:

I mean that was one reason I was trying to give the "its nuanced and complicated depending on where you are in the fedi" and give actual reasoning behind the different ways I've seen it applied on different instances and the fallout of applying it like that.

But also yeah unsure if worth the fight. May be worth publishing as a blog somewhere if we can gather up some more useful tips for fresh admins.

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[KitKat31337]

That quite a long list, and I feel like it would be better be summarized in general for each broad category and then given examples... And generally described overall as, perhaps, "CW should be put on posts that are likely to cause distress to people who are not directly interested in the topic of it, or if the post is inappropriate for viewing in public"?

I dunno, maybe rolled up instead of summarized? I find the detailed list quite useful and have nabbed it actually to give to my users.

[twitchy-ears]

I dunno, maybe rolled up instead of summarized? I find the detailed list quite useful and have nabbed it actually to give to my users.

There's a later categorised version in the quick draft I did, I think its worth reading that draft because I tried to give the context of CW use as I see it and how its complex and varies based on instance and situation for the person, and also that there's a lot someone can do themselves to filter stuff.