Proactive "Best Practices" recommendations for AP implementors

[julianlam]

A best practices section in the first report would go a long way toward curbing problematic material from entering the fediverse. A proactive approach vs. reactive.

1. @renchap from Mastodon suggests a dead-man switch that disabled new user registrations if no admins have logged in after a specified timeout.
2. @julianlam (me!) from NodeBB suggests the use of a post queue to filter out spam waves from any new users with no posts. This is limited to smaller instances, as it requires human effort to scale.

[renchap]

Also do not default to open registrations for new servers, and inform the administrators that open registrations require significant and prompt moderation work

[julianlam]

Most spam centers not around getting their message seen, but rather to create backlinks to other websites.

A blanket noreferrer nofollow ugc value for rel works, but whether this stops spam is suspect (spammers don't tend to care if their spam doesn't work).

Preventing external links might be a natural next step.

[ThisIsMissEm]

@julianlam rel="ugc"? That's a thing?

[ThisIsMissEm]

From #31

Let's come up with some notes on general best practices for Trust & Safety that we can document in the initial report.

Some ideas:

• Recommendation to prefer human moderation, or at least human review of moderation
• Encourage collaborative approaches to moderation: you don't need to just throw a Flag over to another server, you can actively reach out and try to communicate with instances.
• Encourage software implement federation management, i.e., prevent processing activities from certain domains (whilst acknowledging that we won't be tackling federating federation management decisions at this
• Encourage software to implement basic reporting capabilities and general UI recommendations for displaying reports to moderators (i.e., blur / greyscale / don't auto-play media )

[julianlam]

@ThisIsMissEm it is, but how well it's understood by search engines is up for debate. Here's one documentation article that mentions it, but other references are far and few between.