Social WG/Responsibilities
Discord
Thank you soo much El!! This would be amazing! to be frank, you already help us here in the working group and we all truly appreciate that ❤️
Social WG/Responsibilities If you officially join, what this would do is allow us to give you access to the moderation interface where we handle new account requests and reports, and you'd also publicly get the credit that you deserve for all your contributions! :) I think some academics can be really stingy about giving credits (uh see one of my recent polls :P https://neuromatch.social/@manisha/110556283019459141) but in a place like ours where we are all volunteers doing the work, every bit of appreciation goes a long way. So another thing we could be doing more often is showing gratitude to instance members and like <@305044217393053697> mentioned -- make everyone feel welcome and improve our onboarding experience. Like recently from the socialwg account, I've been boosting intros, lab pics, graduation news, etc etc.. We could make all of that more fun and be like "hey #neuromatchstodon <awesome NMS member> got their PhD give them boosts" 🥳 or something
Account requests are usually the fun part of moderation -- I love reading the reasons people/organizations/departments/conferences share for joining the instance and they are always so interesting and diverse! (e.g. the time someone said they had fomo of not being on neuromatch.social ❤️ https://discord.com/channels/1049136631065628772/1049136631065628775/1116378014897426432)
The only thing to be careful of is if the account requester mentions something that could be a violation of our rules or our bylaws. In such instances, I typically ask the instance for their opinion on our social wg forum channel. For full transparency we do have a private mod channel but we haven't used that since April! A good sign that we are not hiding things from the instance. We used to use it only for cases where we had to disclose some PII
Thank you El and welcome onboard!! woohoo!! 🥳 ❤️ 💚 💜 💙 🧡
Social WG/Responsibilities continued: with great power comes great responsibility :)
Before taking any drastic decisions, we should discuss things with the instance -- things like defederation/limiting instances and banning accounts. Also, we should be careful when speaking on behalf of the instance from our "official" accounts like the @socialwg one (this one is quite scary for me because sometime mods say something that ticks another mod/instance member off and then it leads to pile ons 😬 -- so we try to be as cordial as possible and respect people from other instances even if they choose different things for their community - that's fine. we all don't have to be an exact replica of each other :) )
we learn new things from other mods too -- I follow the #fediblock hashtag and keep an eye on anything that could affect us terribly. In the past we have blocked instances based on reports from other mods on this hashtag (see <#1055915765133488158>)
I've been on call since December https://wiki.neuromatch.io/Mastodon/Mods_On_Call. You could add your availability here. Let's get you wiki access as well if you don't have already. Create an account here: https://wiki.neuromatch.io and <@305044217393053697> can approve it when they are back from their short holiday.
Being on call means I check for new account requests once a day and approve them if there aren't any issues. Or bring the discussion to the instance. And handle any reports. We get updates from linode when a few settings cross a threshold. Usually it just means the instance has been busy. But it could also be a DDoS attack -- so I also quickly browse through our local TL and this discord to see nothings blowing up. We have an admin@neuromatch.social account that I monitor every few days. We get very few emails there.