Moderation update from CWG
Dan Phiffer Tue 21 Apr 2026 8:43PMPublicSeen by 185The Community Working Group operations team (CWG) met on April 17 and discussed a moderation case related to the Zeitgeist LLM client and its developer, Laurie Voss, who has been suspended on Social.coop since March 24. Today CWG is adjusting that moderation action to a limit setting and we wanted to explain our reasoning here.
The initial decision to suspend Voss was motivated by protecting the membership of Social.coop. Without any opt-out mechanism, the software he created violated our Federation abuse policy by subjecting our members’ posts (including DMs) to LLM processing. Now that the software supports an opt-out mechnism that violation no longer applies.
We also considered whether Voss's conduct on the thread discussing Fediverse expectations of consent rises to the level of a suspension. Laurie Voss is not a member of Social.coop and we considered whether non-members should be held to the same Code of Conduct standard that we expect of ourselves. While the CWG moderation actions only apply to members—a suspension in our Mastodon instance does not have any effect on other instances—it remains the basis for how we decide how to handle incoming reports and those mod actions do ultimately shape how our membership experiences the Fediverse.
The CWG came to a consensus that if we were to consider another similar report again, without a violation of the Federation abuse policy, most of us would moderate it as a limit instead of a suspension. However, we still find that Voss's conduct does violate the CoC, so the limit mod action seems justified to us.
We also think it's important for the CWG to develop a more clear set of formal conditions, with input from membership, that guide how we moderate cases. There currently is no mechanism to dispute moderation decisions and there should be. And the coop also needs deliberate further on policies relating to how LLM systems process our posts.
The CWG understands the frustration that members may feel when they disagree with a particular moderation case, and that our deliberations may not seem responsive enough when members do feel a need to object. While we cannot commit to having emergency meetings whenever a dispute arises we do think it's important to communicate an expected timeline for handling future disputes.
We are continuing to discuss how conversations with concerned members can happen more productively in the future. When complex cases like these arise, we want to set appropriate expectations about our ability to deliberate effectively. We think it's more important to come to a good decision using a process that builds trust than it is to get there quickly.
Aaron GKWed 22 Apr 2026 3:41PM
Thanks for the update. I think there's a need for folks to discuss possible changes to the code of conduct and federation abuse policies. Many folks felt that strong action like suspension against things like AI scraping is already warranted because scraping is often or usually disrespectful of consent. Additional folks felt that at least social.coop policies should be updated to spell this out more clearly. If anyone wants to take a thoughtful shot at starting that discussion I think it would be welcome and I'd be willing to help if possible. If no one else gets that started I will probably take a shot soon when I have time.
Caitlin Waddick, FWG/OCFri 24 Apr 2026 9:05PM
Hey yall, I am thankful to Dan for this update. ... I am a member of the Organizing Circle. I do not know all the details, but I understand that there were some strong opinions and "hard feelings" around a conflict as a response to this situation.
Thank you to @Matt Noyes for moderating the conflict. We are a stronger community for expecting conflict, normalizing it, and working through it, while caring for each other.
For those volunteers serving on our Working Groups and the Organizing Circle, are there next steps around this conflict that are needed, in your view? Or, is this conflict marked resolved, in your view? ... Maybe certain sensitive comments should not be posted here, or at all; yet, please do not let hard feelings fester completely out of sight. We are a cooperative community.
Thank you to our Community Working Group for continuing to evolve our content moderation policies and guidelines. I appreciate that you all worked hard to try to develop and apply our moderation policies as best you can. You showed up and hung in when "the going got tough."
The Organizing Circle members also made note that we can develop a policy about when our meeting notes are public and when they are private and confidential. In particular, since the CWG is speaking privately and confidentially about specific people, it would be expected that some portion of their meeting notes are not public or that public meeting notes might provide descriptions that the reference certain people anonymously to protect their privacy.
OC Members: @Caitlin Waddick, FWG/OC, @Dan Phiffer , @Flancian, @pjw@social.coop , @Luke Opperman , @Ammar , @Eduardo Mercovich , @Melissa Santos
Former OC Members: @Kathe TB , @MarieVC (social.coop/@MarieVC), @Matt Noyes
Other WG members: @Calix , @Andrew Escobar (Andres) · social.coop Finance Working Group , @Josh Davis, @Alex Rodriguez , ...
Dan PhifferSat 25 Apr 2026 1:42PM
@Caitlin Waddick, FWG/OC thanks for this follow up, I do think there are follow up actions from the meeting. The CWG has some changes in policy we’re considering, we’ll make sure to share them to Loomio once we reach consensus. And I intend to share meeting notes with everyone who was present and figure out how much of it we want to make public, if any.
FlancianMon 27 Apr 2026 10:29AM
@Dan Phiffer looking forward to the full notes from that meeting! I think we should make them public by default, happy to discuss once you have a draft to review if you prefer?
Danyl StrypeSun 26 Apr 2026 4:31AM
@Caitlin Waddick, FWG/OC
We are a stronger community for expecting conflict, normalizing it, and working through it, while caring for each other.
This! 1000 times this! 🎉
FlancianMon 27 Apr 2026 11:01AM
Thanks Dan for posting the update, and thank you @Caitlin Waddick, FWG/OC for posting this reply! I think you raise good points and ask key questions.
On "are there next steps around this conflict that are needed, in your view": as the person who raised concerns about the moderation action with insufficient communication and IMHO insufficient grounding in our Code of Conduct, and went through an almost month-long process with the CWG to discuss and try to resolve the issues, this is not settled and requires further action. Despite the CWG eventually taking the correct action (move to Limit), I saw suboptimal behavior and numerous inefficiencies with our processes that remain unsolved. The CWG has also declined so far to address my requests that they publish moderation transparency reports, communicate proactively with people affected by severe moderation actions (in this case, ~44 people were affected for more than twenty days with no communication to them), work actively to better align moderation and our Code of Conduct and Federation Policy (e.g. calling votes), and behave more respectfully and inclusively towards people raising concerns and giving feedback. Instead their visible focus (with the main exception of a single active member, Melissa, who is excluded from all my concerns with the group) has unfortunately been on questioning the legitimacy of my concerns, asking me to shed my admin status so I lose visibility on their moderation decisions and can be blocked (I must clarify I didn't target them with messages at any point), and seemingly upholding the narrative that they acted optimally at every point in time and the feedback I gave was incorrect and irrelevant.
A side note on meeting notes being public or private: I do agree this is worth discussing and could likely be specified better, but to be clear, all of the TWG, CWG and OC notes have been public by default (modulo manual redactions of sensitive topics) at least since I started doing work for the coop back in 2021. During this "appeal" process I got chided for reading the CWG notes while waiting for an update on the moderation decision once the communicated date had come and passed, but to be clear they are still open and public and I don't think it is reasonable to imply that I shouldn't have read them, or indeed to imply that anybody in the coop is doing anything wrong if they read public documents that we produce in working groups.
I would personally love it if the Organizing Circle could take a moderation/mediation/CoC alignment role from here on, as in retrospect probably should have happened given that the discussion so far has been between 5-6 CWG members and this 1 TWG member and this has felt unfortunately very lopsided and scarcely objective and inclusive; definitely not friendly, and that would be hopefully the standard among cooperators. I think there were several things wrong with the process, including with the meeting of the 23rd, that I would like to discuss openly with interested people to make sure nothing like this can happen again; but I also want to be respectful of the individuals in the CWG, many of which are also going through their own learning experiences (like I am now), and all of which are trying to do work for the coop. So my current plan is to wait for Dan to publish the notes from the meeting and the OC to hopefully review the situation and help us decide on the right way forward for the coop.
Danyl StrypeTue 28 Apr 2026 6:00AM
@Caitlin Waddick, FWG/OC I agree with @Flancian that there is plenty of important stuff to be followed up here. Everything Flancian says sounds concerning to me.
Moderation in any fediverse service ought to be subject to oversight by the people using the service, and all the more so in one run by a democratic organisation like a co-op. Otherwise - even with the best of intentions - mod decisions can drift into people/ groups enforcing their partisan opinions on the community, rather than protecting the community from activity that violates the co-op's democratically agreed policies.
Oversight is impossible if all mod deliberations happen in secret. I agree it's best if they're not public by default, but they ought to be visible to co-op members by default. Whenever mods feel the need to discuss a situation in private ("go into committee" in Robert's Rules jargon), the onus needs to be on them to satisfy the membership that this is justified and necessary, on a case-by-case basis. A couple of policies I'd suggest;
If the mods identify a situation as sensitive enough to discuss in private that ought to require a vote here, with an opportunity for members to block.
Private mod discussions ought to become visible to the membership once a decision is made and the matter is closed.
Mods can't really avoid identifying accounts when linking to posts as examples of potentially policy violations. But if they have reasonable concerns about people's privacy, and it is possible to hold the discussion without identifying them, I think it's acceptable to use pseudonyms (eg 'Account N') instead of identifiable names.
There may be good reasons why everything I'm saying here is wrong, or out-of-context. But a robust discussion about all this, involving a representative sample of the membership, seems necessary and important.
Billy SmithTue 28 Apr 2026 7:22AM
@Danyl Strype
The other thing that we all need to remember is that we are using a very limited medium of communication.
70% of the information in a face-to-face conversation comes from the body language, and when communicating purely via text, we are only getting the 30% of the information. :D
Luke Opperman ·Tue 21 Apr 2026 9:56PM
Thanks for keeping us informed as you've talked this through, no disagreement here. Process-wise, I think this one went pretty well actually - perhaps there are contexts for a more formal and private disputation, but in general I think Loomio as the exception-handling venue is just fine, bringing input back to your regularly scheduled working group meetings.