@mike- new numbers, but ones that tell the same story we discussed on your podcast: on my server, we have about 1 moderator to 500 users. Here are the new numbers on how that dynamic plays out for major social platforms in the EU:
"X does have the worst ratio of moderation staff to users, at 1/60,249, with LinkedIn coming in second (1/41,652), then TikTok (1/22,586) and Meta (1/17,600)."
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-has-significantly-fewer-moderation-staff/714650/
@tchambers Thanks for sharing! Here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation for the whole Fediverse, using data from fedidb.org:
Assuming that Monthly Active Users (MAUs) are the relevant quantity, and assuming further that there is at least one admin or moderator per server, the ratio is (1 million) to (27 thousand) which is approximately 1/37.
Take that with a pinch of salt though, it is but a very crude estimate which averages over wildly differently-sized instances etc. etc.
@tchambers And if we look at the total Fediverse user count, not the MAUs?
There are about 10 million users according to fedidb.org, so we get a ratio of 1/370.
@fediplomacy @tchambers I think you want the total number of accounts, not just MAUs..
So 15119615 / 27788 ~= 544 users per moderator.
Yes, this is an important distinction.
It should also be noted that this is not an apples-to-apples distinction:
* How many moderator _hours_ are being used? This is going to be largely homogenous between the major platforms, it is not homogenous for the fediverse.
* How many moderators are _paid_? This is going to be largely homogenous between major platforms, it is not homogenous for the fediverse
* How much _duplication of effort_ is there?
etc.
@hrefna @thisismissem @fediplomacy Also: I'd wager that most Mastodon admins know their server users better, and know the local community that their server focuses on better than say a moderator covering all of say, France, or the entire EU...
@tchambers @hrefna @fediplomacy I've actually an issue open for creating a moderation statistics endpoint, to try to add transparency to moderation practices, which could help here.
@thisismissem @tchambers @hrefna Very cool! We have been discussing something like an "admin load meter" for the server status page in the team too.
We found it challenging to conceptualize it as a metric (akin to the usual CPU load thingy with averages for 1/5/15 minutes) that – looping back to the discussion in the thread above – "somehow" "correctly" conveys instance size, user base, number of posts, moderation queue length .... an interesting design question to work on.