Any questions are also welcome.
How would a moderator team deploy and customize this bot? Who will host it? You? The instance admins? The moderators themselves?
Thanks!
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
34 points (88.6% liked)
Fediverse
28561 readers
243 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I am thinking of making a website for it to act as a dashboard. The community owner will get a UUID as a password to access the dashboard of the community. For security reasons, the password will be reset when the owner of a community changes. I actually just thought of hosting the bot myself on lemmings.world.
As for the mods accessing the dashboard to configure the bot, I don't know yet. Any suggestions?
As for the mods accessing the dashboard to configure the bot, I don’t know yet. Any suggestions?
Suggestions for how the mods could securely access and configure the dashboard?
I feel like a "login" could be done similar to how @[email protected] configured the login for [email protected]. The automod bot could DM the mod account and provide an access code.
The dashboard itself could be as simple as an editable text file for each community, containing if-then and regex rules, or you could go for a fancier GUI if you are feeling ambitious.
I am trying to decrease the API calls as much as possible, so that is not an option. I might just have the owner decide with which mod they want to share it with. That seems to be the easiest option tbh. It also shifts the responsibility from the developer (me) to the consumer (the owner).
I am thinking of having a simple login form with a community ID field (which will be provided by the bot along with the password) and a password field which will just be a UUID. There is no checking done whether the person logging in is really a moderator of community X or not so yeah.
Thanks for taking this on! Lemmy is lacking these sorts of flexible and robust moderation tools.
What other features do you think are possible?
I think the ability to auto comment could be combined with regex and not limited to punishment. The ability to reply to an arbitrary string or list of strings with another string could be quite useful. Do you think this would be feasible?
Yeah, I'd like to make the bot flexible as well. Noted.
I think the strike system would make sense and limiting by account age might work as well, but I don't think the other simple methods of moderation are going to be that useful, as word blacklists always have false positives and auto community lockdown could be exploited by someone to sabotage a community. (like with a denial of service attack)
Also, this is just my opinion but I really hate it when software speaks to me like they're real people, I understand that it is ultimately written by a person but when the same phrase is repeated to every person regardless of the context it just annoys me. Similiarly I don't like the automod messages/comments on reddit because it just feels like low effort content in comparison to what real people post on there.
I think this would make more sense framed as a plugin rather than a bot, because a bot post is placed equally to a human post while being inherently lower importance.
If I were to suggest features it would be something like a large language model based content filter, but I understand the computational and cost limitations would make that challenging.
LLMs are too expensive to run and slow as well. As for the lockdown system, DoS as in sending API calls to send messages? Yeah well that's considered spam and will indeed lock the community down. But it won't happen instantly and I still need to plan how it would detect spam and whether it will attempt to automatically ban the spammers or not. The bot is still in the preparation phase, I haven't done any work yet.
As discussed in some other comment, the bot will not delete posts that are triggered by regex or word blacklist but report them. The bot indeed won't understand context so it will do more harm than good. I am also thinking of transliterating content to catch people using symbols that look like certain characters like € for E and $ for S. That will be done at the webhook level though.