A Minute from the Moderators
Welcome to February!
For both this month’s and next’s Moderator Minutes, we’d like to spend some time discussing Community Care in Online Spaces: what it looks like, why it matters, and how the ways we engage with each other can either cultivate or corrode it.
What Is Community Care?
Community care, in its most tangible form, tends to manifest as in-person support services. Body doubling for errands, welfare check-ins, shared meals. The kind of reciprocal sustenance that keeps people and neighborhoods intact. While we are not in person here, the underlying ethos translates directly to digital spaces. The way we center our intentions is the same; it is the modality that differs.
Community care in an online context is the practice of centering collective wellbeing in how we engage with each other. Not merely what we say, but also: how we interpret, how we respond, and how we protect. It encompasses the choices we make when we encounter something that confuses us, frustrates us, or frightens us. It is, ultimately, the difference between reacting and responding.
Why Now?
We have noticed an increase in certain patterns appearing in our reports and as well as the broader Fediverse. They tend to cluster into a few categories: people having difficulty expressing or maintaining their boundaries, people having difficulty understanding and respecting the boundaries of others, people struggling to de-escalate conflict, changes and reinterpretations of historical norms and phrases, and an increase in reported posts (on and off Hachyderm) that start to touch on our “No Violence” rule.
We are not going to address all of these in a single post. This month, we are focusing on norm shifts: how they happen, why they matter, and how they can be both a force for care and a vector for harm. In our next Moderator Minutes, we will address some of what drives all of us toward confrontation and what it means to channel that energy safely. Boundaries and de-escalation will follow after that.
These patterns are not unrelated phenomena, and some of them have been building for years. They share a common root: the compounding stress of navigating spaces where the rules of engagement are shifting under everyone’s feet, incumbents and newcomers alike. When our reserves are depleted, our interpretive generosity contracts. Our fuses shorten. Our impulse to correct, rather than connect, intensifies. All of this is understandable, and much of it is even admirable in its origin. But the downstream effects are creating friction and, in some cases, genuine harm within our community.
We want to walk through this pattern. Not to admonish, but to illuminate. And as you read, we’d like to ask you to hold two questions:
- When you encounter a norm violation, how do you tend to respond?
-and- - Has it been working?
Shifting Norms and Maladaptive Responses
When Communities Collide
Norms collide whenever a community changes substantially in size or composition. For the Fediverse, 2022 was a major inflection point. People leaving The Twitter That Was arrived in droves, and with them came an entirely different set of internalized expectations about how to engage on social media.
The existing Fediverse had, over years, developed norms around content warnings, alt text, hashtag usage, thread etiquette, and more. These norms were often unwritten, learned through participation in comparatively small communities where people knew each other. When the population grew by orders of magnitude, those norms didn’t scale with it. There was no infrastructure to onboard newcomers into them. The new arrivals were not being taught; they were being expected to already know.
The response from much of the incumbent population was, understandably, frustration. People who had built something felt it was being overrun. But frustration without a constructive channel tends to curdle. It can stop us from seeing other choicees, and may leave us feeling like there were no choices at all. Justified burnout and ire lead to what some have come to call a “Fedi HOA” culture: hair-splitting interpretations of norms that felt, to those on the receiving end, like their intentions and learning path were being borderline weaponized.
For example, many of us have seen situations where a conversation unexpectedly escalated in visibility, and rather than reaching out to the relevant moderation teams to de-escalate, entire instances were blocked. Sometimes the mods (or admins) themselves were involved in the conflict itself. These scaling problems were felt as acts of aggression. These by type may be a more dramatic example, but the everyday version is equally as pervasive: people being yelled at for not using content warnings rather than being asked to use them. The newcomers were not told what was wanted from them. They were punished for not already knowing. Incumbents were exhausted, trying to bring newcomers into the fold. And on and on the wheel turned.
Here is the uncomfortable question: did all of this work?
If what we tried had been effective, we would now have 100% consistent usage of content warnings, alt text, and hashtag consistency across the Fediverse. We do not. The behavior that felt right, maybe even righteous, of correcting people loudly and publicly, did not produce the outcome it was meant to produce. It produced a population of newer users who were socialized to expect abuse rather than receive guidance. And when newcomers learned to ignore the torrent, they also missed the message.
The Patterns That Persisted
Some of the maladaptive engagement patterns that emerged from this period have calcified into features of how people interact on the Fediverse today. We want to name two, because they illustrate how legitimate needs can generate responses that don’t actually serve those needs.
The first is inconsistent expectations around what degree of diligence someone should read up on all other parties in a thread. People carry a considerable amount of energy into interactions with the presumption that others should have reviewed their biography, their pinned posts, their history before engaging with them at all. And when someone interacts without that context, those who feel unseen and unheard often treat others as if they have been personally affronted.
The underlying need is real. People want to be understood. They want their context to be respected. But expecting every person who encounters your posts to research your biography before interacting is not scalable. It never was, and it certainly is not now. Being angry at an individual for failing to do something that people do not consistently do directs frustration at individual people for a systemic impossibility.
The second is the rise of tools like Do Not Reply cards. These exist to solve a genuine problem: someone posts a question to the public internet, say, “people who have experience with $TOPIC, I’d like to ask…” and everyone answers, including people without the relevant experience. The responses are unhelpful, the poster is overwhelmed, and the signal is drowned in noise.
The maladaptive solution: cards that tell people not to engage with your public posts. Essentially: as a community, we have started posting on the public internet to tell people not to interact with us.
We say this not to mock the impulse. The frustration is legitimate, and the boundary is reasonable. (We even talk about it in our Docs.) But the mechanism is not working as well as people need it to. It is an expression of frustration dressed as a solution. It does not build the connective infrastructure that would actually address the underlying need. And it normalizes a posture of preemptive hostility toward engagement itself, the very thing that online community is built from.
If you use these tools, or if you carry the expectation that others should research you before engaging: we are not asking you to stop having those needs. We are asking you to sit with the question we posed earlier. Is it working?
The Smallest Scale
The same pattern plays out interpersonally. We were recently privy to a situation on the Fediverse involving attribution norms where the phrase “stealing to share” was used. The parties involved interpreted the situation differently, the interaction escalated, and multiple moderation teams became involved. We are not going to recount the specifics or adjudicate who was right, because the specifics are not the point.
What we want to talk about is the pattern. These types of interactions, where a norm in transition meets people with different contexts and expectations, tend to follow a predictable trajectory. Someone perceives a violation. They respond with accusation or correction. The other person, feeling attacked, becomes defensive. The defensive response is read as doubling down. Escalation follows. By the time it’s over, neither party has gotten what they actually needed, and the original issue (in this case, attribution) has been buried under layers of conflict.
This trajectory is not inevitable, but it is common enough to be worth examining. Accusation, even when justified, activates self-protection. Self-protection is not understanding. And understanding is what is actually needed for someone to change their behavior. If the goal is for people to share with attribution, then the response that serves that goal is the one that communicates it clearly: “please credit me when you share.” The response that is least likely to achieve that goal is the one that triggers a defensive reaction and ensures the person never hears the underlying request at all.
This does not mean that the person who feels wronged is at fault for the escalation. Sometimes you communicate clearly, you make a reasonable request, and the other person still doesn’t hear you. When that happens, that is on them. You can choose other tools that available to you at that point that are not esclatory, such as: disengagement and contacting moderation (reporting the behavior, contacting the relevant moderation team). We will talk more about this in our next Moderator Minutes, but we want to name it here: choosing community care does not guarantee care in return. It is still, in our view, the better choice. Not only because it is more likely to produce the outcome you want, but because the practice of choosing connection over punishment is itself part of building the community we believe that we all want to live in.
Two Reactions
Back to the topic at hand, across all of these scales (the ecosystem-wide migration, the persistent patterns, the individual interaction) there are two common response patterns:
Reaction A: correct and punish. Yelling about content warnings. Using content moderation as a tool for retaliation, via blocks and so forth. Treating colloquialisms as transgressions. Responding to perceived norm violations with accusation rather than communication. These responses share a common thread: they express what someone doesn’t want without communicating what they do want. They create conflict in the space where connection could have been.
Reaction B: connect and guide. Reaching out to moderation teams to help onboard newcomers and de-escalate conflict. Telling someone directly what you need from an interaction rather than punishing them for not intuiting correctly. Responding to “I’m going to steal this to share!” with “please credit me when you share with your friends!” Sending requests to moderation teams to please talk to their member about respecting boundaries. These responses share a different common thread: they lead with intention. They identify the actual gap and offer a path across it.
Reaction B is community care. Reaction A, however understandable its origins, is not.
We are not suggesting that Reaction B is easy, or that it should be the default in every circumstance. There are bad-faith actors for whom connection is not the answer, and we will address that directly in our next Moderator Minutes. But for the vast majority of these collisions we see, the person on the other side of the interaction is not acting in bad faith. They are navigating norms that are shifting under their feet, just as you are being exhausted by the same.
When Norms Become Weapons
The dual nature of shifting norms carries a harmful corollary that we need to name explicitly. One of the ways that queer and Black people experience harassment online is not always through direct hostility (slurs, threats, overt bigotry). It is through the selective and disproportionate enforcement of rules and standards.
What this can look like: if a rule exists, queer and Black community members must abide by it more scrupulously, and will be held accountable more harshly for perceived transgressions. The examples above are relatively benign, misinterpretations and scaling failures. But the same mechanism scales toward something that is used as a vector for harm. When norms shift, they do not shift uniformly for everyone. The same behavior that is overlooked or forgiven in one person becomes grounds for a report when performed by someone from a marginalized community. The rule itself may be neutral in its text. Its application is not.
We want to be clear: this is a form harassment. It may not look like a slur, but holding queer and Black people to a different, and often impossible, standard is a form of harm that is both pervasive and difficult to name, precisely because it cloaks itself in the language of fairness and rule-following.
We raise this here because it is inextricable from the conversation about norms. As our community develops and refines its standards for engagement, we must remain vigilant about who those standards are being applied to, and whether the application is equitable. Rules are tools. Like all tools, they can be used to build or to bludgeon.
Choosing How We Respond
We have spent much of this post describing what can go wrong. We want to close with what can go right.
The question we asked you to carry, is it working?, is not meant to shame anyone. It is meant to open space for a different kind of honesty. Many of us have invested significant emotional energy in behaviors that feel right but are not producing the outcomes we want. That is not a moral failing. It is an invitation to try something else.
Reaction B is not just a better response to any single situation. It is a practice. It is the habit of leading with what you want. The habit of assuming the person in front of you is capable of growth rather than deserving of punishment. The habit of asking yourself, before you hit “post,” whether your words are building the community you want to inhabit.
This is not naivete, and it is not asking you to extend infinite grace to bad-faith actors. That is a different conversation, and one we will address next month. It is asking you to extend considered grace to the people around you who are, like all of us, navigating norms that are shifting under their feet.
What if we chose now to stop engaging in behaviors that are not, or no longer, serving us and instead invested in trying new ones that might?
A Question for You
We’d like to close with something for the community to sit with:
When you encounter a norm in transition (something that used to be fine but is now contested, or something that used to be unacceptable but is gaining new context) how do you decide how to respond? What helps you lead with curiosity rather than correction?
We’d love to hear your reflections. Last Moderator Minutes we started a discussion via a Github Issue, this time we’ll actually point you to our Discord‡. In our next Moderator Minutes, we will be discussing what happens when the impulse to act on something distressing meets the realities of online safety, and how community care applies when the stakes are higher than the examples we explored here.
As always, processes grow over time, and this conversation is no exception.
‡ Discord: we’re actually in the process of migrating out of Discord to Zulip! We’re not doing the final leg of the proces until the moderation team feels appropriately comfortable and confident with the new tools, though it’s probable that future discussions will be in Zulip so stay tuned.