Hi all, I'm Emelia, the co-lead of the ActivityPub Trust & Safety Taskforce operating under the Social Web CG. We're starting this forum to try to encourage a bit more asynchronous participation in the taskforce and provide a fediverse-native touch point for people interested in trust and safety.
This forum does not replace the GitHub issues for the taskforce, where we have specific discussion. We will still have our monthly meetings for the taskforce that happen via a video call with minutes taken and published in the repository.
However, we do want to help people get involved in the taskforce and better understand the taskforces' current areas of work. We've a pretty huge backlog of issues, and there's currently three main focus areas of work, these are:
- The Initial Report that aims to provide context for understanding trust and safety at a high-level and what features you may need to implement in fediverse software to foster good trust and safety and moderation.
- Work on Improving Moderation Activities, this covers standardising Flag activities, ensuring that there is enough information in the activities to enable moderation teams, and ensuring the Flag activities reach the correct moderation team directly. At the same time, we're working on inter-server communication between moderation teams, without disclosing individual team members.
- Finally, we have Content warnings, labels, and annotations: this is where we've had most work right now. We've previously reached a consensus that we won't be adding a new property for content warnings, but we will document how that is currently supported (hint: it's not just
summary being present on an object, but rather summary + as:sensitive being present). We're also working on content labelling, which allows usage of well-known vocabularies as to enable better filtering that is not just keyword matching, eventually the goal is to support annotations, where a third-party can publish content labels on Objects and Actors, and interested parties can subscribe — this removes the burden from the author to label their posts (which for some author's is currently a self-censorship requirement)
Once we've made significant progress in these identified areas of work, we may take on additional areas of work.
The taskforce meets virtually via a video call once a month, and you can find the calendar on the W3C website. It's free to participate in W3C community groups and taskforces, though you will want a W3C account with the CLA and IPR agreement in place, which can be done at:
I'll be monitoring this forum and providing answers / guidance where I can, however, as running the taskforce is unpaid work, I'm unfortunately not able to provide extensive amounts of time, so I may not always respond quickly.
