Will Admins Cope? Decentralized Moderation in the Fediverse
Open accessAbstract
As an alternative to Twitter and other centralized social networks, the Fediverse is growing in popularity. The recent, and polemical, takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk has exacerbated this trend. The Fediverse includes a growing number of decentralized social networks, such as Pleroma or Mastodon, that share the same subscription protocol (ActivityPub). Each of these decentralized social networks is composed of independent instances that are run by different administrators. Users, however, can interact with other users across the Fediverse regardless of the instance they are signed up to. The growing user base of the Fediverse creates key challenges for the administrators, who may experience a growing burden. In this paper, we explore how large that overhead is, and whether there are solutions to alleviate the burden. We study the overhead of moderation on the administrators. We observe a diversity of administrator strategies, with evidence that administrators on larger instances struggle to find sufficient resources. We then propose a tool, WatchGen, to semi-automate the process.
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Governance decisions in decentralized social media are typically made by instance administrators, who tend to be more responsive and accessible than executives of large, centrally-operated social media platforms during times of user dissatisfaction.
“Governance decisions are typically made by instance administrators [5,32], who tend to be more responsive and accessible than the executives of large, centrally-operated social media platforms [4,56,119] during times of user dissatisfaction.”
From Seeing the Politics of Decentralized Social Media Protocols (2026) · cites this paper as [5]
Split into 2 atoms — 1 confirmed, 0 partially supported, 0 disputed, 0 misattributed, 1 unverifiable. Expand the claim to see per-atom verdicts.
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredPrior work on decentralized social media rarely considers how the underlying protocols structure and shape the systems being examined.
“Focused on user experiences in the context of specific app implementations such as mastodon.socialand Bluesky [5,49,82,109,119], this work rarely considers how the underlying protocols structure and shape the systems being examined.”
From Seeing the Politics of Decentralized Social Media Protocols (2026) · cites this paper as [5]
The Introduction describes a study focused on the Pleroma implementation, supporting the app-specific part of the citation. But it examines administrator actions rather than user experiences, and the Introduction and §2 explain how federation and the shared ActivityPub protocol shape cross-instance interaction and moderation. This paper alone also does not establish that prior work rarely considers protocols. (LLM, conf=0.82)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredDecentralizing power over infrastructure entails operating Clients, Servers, and Aggregators, imposing significant time, mental health, and financial costs on independent operators.
“Finally, decentralizing power over infrastructure entails operating Clients, Servers, and Aggregators, imposing significant time, mental health, and financial costs on independent operators as noted in recent work [5,8,15,18,51].”
From Seeing the Politics of Decentralized Social Media Protocols (2026) · cites this paper as [5]
The Introduction (page unavailable) says individuals or organisations can manage independent servers and that federation adds overhead for administrators. The Administrators section describes cumbersome day-to-day work. The paper does not establish mental-health or financial costs, or address operating Clients and Aggregators. (LLM, conf=0.87)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredProtocols make key decisions about how to decentralize that are likely to give rise to dynamics documented in recent empirical work, such as challenges faced by admins of ActivityPub-based social networks.
“We suggest that protocols make key decisions about how to decentralize that are likely to give rise to those dynamics documented in recent empirical work, such as challenges faced by admins of ActivityPub-based social networks [5,119] as they take on key roles as operators of Spaces, Servers, and Clients.”
From Seeing the Politics of Decentralized Social Media Protocols (2026) · cites this paper as [5]
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References 53 · Cited by 33
Research works printed but not linked: 3
- Datta A, Buchegger S, Vu L-H, Strufe T, and Rzadca K. 2010. Decentralized online social networks. In: Furht B (ed) Handbook of social network technologies and applications. In Springer. 349-378.
- Amir H Razavi, Diana Inkpen, Sasha Uritsky, and Stan Matwin. 2010. Ofensive language detection using multi-level classifcation. In In Canadian Conference on Artifcial Intelligence. Springer. 16-27.
- Chancellor Stevie, Lin Zhiyuan, and De Choudhury Munmun. 2009. This post will just get taken down": Characterizing removed pro-eating disorder Social media content. In 2009 6th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, CCNC 2009. 1157-1162.
- Authors
- Anaobi, I. H., Raman, A., Castro, I., Zia, H. B., Ibosiola, D., & Tyson, G.
- Affiliations
- Queen Mary University of London (GB)
- Telefónica (Spain) (ES)
- Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China
- ORCID
- Venue
- Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2023-04-30
- Pages
- 3109-3120
- OpenAlex
- W4320853810
- Cited by
- 33
- References
- 53
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 2
- FWCI
- 5.86
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Queen Mary Research Online (Queen Mary University of London) (submittedVersion)
- Rare & Special e-Zone (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
- Funders
- UK Research and Innovation (DSNmod REPHRAIN EP/V011189/1)
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/S033564/1, EP/W032473/1)
- HORIZON EUROPE Framework Programme (01093006 (TaRDIS))
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Keywords
- Fediverse, decentralized social networks, content moderation, Mastodon, Pleroma
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