Operations Q&A

How is the work organized for the administration and moderation of the server, compared to the amount of users?

As of August 2025, we have about 460 active users. About 15 volunteers attempt to keep up with them all.  

Do you have or need a specific organizational structure?

We have a handful of working groups (circles), described on our Operations page:

• Community Working Group (CWG) · 4 members
• Finance Working Group (FWG) · 3 members
• Legal Working Group (LWG) · 0 members
• Organizing Circle (OC) · 4 members, plus a representative from each working group
• Tech Working Group (TWG) · 3 members (4+ members with keys and [server access](https://www.loomio.com/d/jrbG5tue/server-access))

Moderation is handled by the Community Working Group Ops Team.

Do you have regular meetings of the moderating team?

The Community Working Group meets every month.

How / By whom are the complaints/reports handled?

See both Reporting guide for the member-facing guide and Federation abuse policy for the actions that a moderator may take in response to report.

How many people-hours per week are needed?

See the section on the Community Ops Team Members Role: Community Working Group Ops Team

Each Moderation shift is 1 week, and the notes accurately show that the time spent varies greatly by the number of reports received. It can be as little as less than an hour/week or several hours if there are difficult reports or a spam wave.

Are there a lot of reports?

In the week of August 19-26 2025, we received 8 reports, 2 of which were reports by members of other servers about members of other servers. The other 6 were by members of our server, but about the behavior of members of other servers. Reports ABOUT members of our server are rare, but require a lot more thought and effort to handle.

How are the decision about moderation taken?

Generally, the oncall moderator relies on their own judgement (and refers to Federation abuse policy ) to handle most reports, but the rest of the Community Working Group is available (we have used Mastodon Private Messages in the past, and are currently experimenting with Zulip for this additional conversation) to discuss how to respond to a report.

How do you dispatch the tasks among the volunteers?

We try to have 4 or 5 active members of the Ops team so that the week-long shifts are spread out a bit. Whoever is on-call that shift makes an attempt to handle everything that comes in: reports, new member applications, etc.

Concerning federation, which policy do you apply?

Here is our Federation abuse policy

This covers both how we try to handle complaints against individuals and how and when we take action against instances.