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Just to state the obvious:
Any moderation system like Mastodon’s that regularly lets through the kind of sewage that @KimCrayton1 has been highlighting is a moderation system that is failing.
Failing.
Full stop. https://dair-community.social/@KimCrayton1/112872020308883967
Spare me the lectures about moving instances, the philosophical underpinnings of federation, “just ignore it,” “I don’t see it,” or whatever excuse you’re halfway through typing.
There’s an old engineering saying: all it’s gotta do is work.
It doesn’t work.
The account in that screenshot appears to be on a self-hosted instance. That is one of the recurring sources of moderation troubles: some new actor can create a pop-up harassment node. Since there’s no instance-level moderation, every •other• instance has to block the account •individually•, which takes time.
(Of course, self-hosted instances are also more vulnerable to attacks of various kinds, and are paying for traffic out of pocket if there’s a DDoS, so…real tradeoff for the trolls there.)
Several replies either asking what the solution is, or proposing one.
Some important context for the posts upthread: We are still at the point where many people are denying that there even •is• a problem with moderation on Mastodon.
The immediate next step here is simply to say, loud and clear, “This is unacceptable.” Let’s not skip that step. It matters.
Beyond that…
…to those proposing solutions: Thanks, keep brainstorming, seek the thoughts of others. There are people who’ve already been thinking about this for a while.
…to those replying in a “How do I help?” spirit: Awesome, please mind the previous post upthread.
…to those inching toward “Don’t complain if you don’t have a solution:” The first step of finding solutions is identifying problems. Denying problems is a way of preventing solutions. Piss off and thx for coming to my TED talk.
My own quick brainstorm for faster, better moderation:
- Reply controls already, like yesterday
- Default to allowlisting for new/unknown instances instead of denylisting
- Federated moderation: option to publish & subscribe to moderation decisions of other trusted instances. Instance owner could (1) fully subscribe to one (e.g. “mirror all of hachyderm’s moderation”) or (2) automatically apply decisions to own instance that multiple other instances made, past some consensus threshold
[Minor note on last idea, since it got boosted: the system would to need either distinguish originating from federated mod decisions, or employ some other mechanism to prevent graph cycles and thus feedback loops where a since mod decision achieves an arbitrarily high level of trust by circulating. Solvable. Just not a completely obvious idea; needs a little thought.]
In light of all the above, I want to give a shout-out to the #Hachyderm moderation team. In my view, they are doing just about the best job any instance mod team could reasonably do under the current system: proactive, transparent, and often ahead of the curve on the block when these toxic trolls surface.
We can’t expect the average instance to do better — or even nearly as well. They're your gold standard for instance-level work. Further improvements must happen at the larger system level.
@inthehands We just wanted to say thank you 
The moderation team works very hard and we appreciate you. We do our best to research harmful content before it reaches the server so that our users aren't exposed to it. We are always open to discuss our process to explain how we do things and how to make improvements.
@hachyderm
I do appreciate you all a whole lot. You have a super tough job.
Like I said in the replies to this discussion, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect •any• moderation team to do a better job than you all do at the instance level; further improvements need to be systemic and structural, at the level of Mastodon and/or the whole fedi.
We agree and have a lot of thoughts on moderation tooling and the things that we do to try and make it work regardless. As has been pointed out by others, essentially all Fedi instances (including ours) are volunteer driven and almost all software being developed in the Fedi space is likely also free.
In the past we've focused on "how you can help us" information:
https://community.hachyderm.io/blog/2023/04/05/a-minute-from-the-moderators/
1/2
That said, we are working on a couple of blog posts right now, and explaining at least some of the tooling could be a fit for the piece, if people find it helpful. Our thinking thus far was that people would mostly find it a lot of information they don't use ever (like learning how to change a tire, never changing a tire, and then forgetting how to change a tire).
That all said, if people find it useful we can queue up a post about tools work.
2/2
As a PS, there is an article that shows what moderation reports look like - both what a user selects and how that shows to us when we view it.
https://community.hachyderm.io/docs/mastodon/moderation/report-feature/
@hachyderm @inthehands I would be very interested in those blog posts, and I suspect I would find them very useful
Sure thing, we'd be happy to include some information about how the moderation tools work!
Users can request blog posts or docs on whatever helps them, so if you ever find anything missing please let us know! 
Interesting, thanks!
I have a general interest in write-ups from experienced Fedi mods (you or others) about how the moderation tools work and how they could be better. That's not because I'm all that likely to be using them or building them directly, but to understand the constraints, and know what improvements might be useful to advocate for. Plus for systems-geekery curiosity reasons haha :-)
We were thinking of doing a general write up, especially after noticing one of the accounts we follow (who runs a solo server) struggle with "is this report to me? am I supposed to do something with this?" because of ways that the report feature work that are non-obvious when you haven't processed ~7k over 2 years 
This type of write up will be quite lengthy and released in parts. But it seems like there's enough interest in it.
For anyone interested in features about Mastodon specifically, you can submit feature requests on their GitHub.
It's worth mentioning that Mastodon is not the only federating software, it is only one. The different tools may all federate but they have completely different UI experiences and can have different moderation features.