I think QoL tools for moderators need to become more of a Fediverse priority. This burns people out. Key moderators of communities quit and communities become abandoned.

Ideas :

  • Automatic removal option to remove posts and/or comments for specific keywords. This would be most useful for automatically removing posts and comments when people slur. Piefed already has a keyword filter for visibility. This could be expanded to community settings. Have it also fire-off a report to the moderators when someone triggers it.
  • Automatic URL removal. Allow communities to blacklist specific urls. Useful for politics or news communities that want to negate sources known for misinformation.
  • Automatic removal for repeat URL posting. Very useful for politics or news communities to prevent double-posting.
  • Make it so a community can set itself up to only accept text posts, video posts, or image posts. This should prevent tedious janitorial cleanup for communities that only allow links, or text posts (the most common two).
  • Post Delay Restrictions. Some communities, perhaps not many, might be interested in posting cooldowns for users. So you can only post 1 post every hour, or 2 posts every hour - or whatever the chosen limit is. This would help negate spammers and over-enthusiastic posters flooding a topical community.
  • Post Formatting Requirements. This one could be trickier and more effort than most of the others, but setting conditions for the formatting of new posts would be useful.

Now, not all communities would make use or have any need to make use of all of these - but many would to varying degrees - and it would help them.

I think going down this road is important to prevent moderators burning out over the drudgery of moderating communities.

  • Nutomic@lemmy.ml
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    5 hours ago

    To get new posts and comments for all known communities you only need to make regular requests to /api/v3/post/list?limit=50&sort=New&type_=All and /api/v3/comment/list?limit=50&sort=New&type_=All. Its not necessary to make separate requests for each community. The default rate limit allows 180 read requests per minute so you can comfortably poll this every second (in practice every 30s or so should be enough). If you miss an item (ie post or comment id was skipped) just load the following page.

    The plugin system in 1.0 would be another option. It will still take some time until that is released, but there shouldnt be any reliability issues.

    Youre right that federation solves these problems, but instead you get another problem of writing all this federation code and making sure it is compatible with different platforms. Lemmy’s federation code has around 12k lines so that is a lot. It seems much simpler to use the API for Lemmy, Piefed etc and write abstractions for common functionality.

    Anyway this is my opinion. Its your project so in the end its your decision how to implement it.