Moderation tools

Moderation happens at two levels: what a reader does for themselves, and what an admin does for the whole instance.

User-level

Tool	Effect	Applies to
Mute	Hides their content from you; they are not notified	Local and remote accounts
Block	Mute, plus severing the follow relationship both ways	Local and remote accounts
Remove follower	Revokes an existing subscription to you	Local and remote
Follower approval	Holds every inbound follow for review	Set in Settings → Privacy
Report	Sends a post or account to the admin queue	Local and remote

Muted and blocked accounts are listed in Settings → Muted and blocked and can be undone at any time.

Admin-level

Reports

Admin → Reports is the moderation queue. For each report you can:

• review the reported post or actor,
• remove the post,
• dismiss the report.

Reports cover remote content too, though your only lever on a remote post is to stop serving it locally.

Users

Admin → Users suspends or reinstates local accounts. A suspended account cannot sign in and its content stops being served.

Federation and defederation

Admin → Federation blocks a domain outright — and blocking purges already-cached content from that domain, rather than only filtering what arrives next. Re-federating a domain restores delivery going forward; purged content does not come back on its own.

AI-scraper protection

Admin → Security enables a proof-of-work challenge on page loads. It is a scraping mitigation rather than a moderation tool, but it lives in the same place. Off by default; see Admin panel for the trade-offs.

What moderation cannot do

• It cannot delete a post from other servers. Removal federates a Delete, which well-behaved servers honour. That is a protocol convention, not an enforcement mechanism.
• It cannot prevent screenshots or archiving. Anything published publicly is public.
• It cannot moderate other instances’ users on their own instances. Your reach ends at what your instance serves and who it delivers to.

A practical policy

1. Publish your instance’s rules somewhere readers can find them.
2. Handle reports promptly — an unattended queue trains people not to report.
3. Prefer the narrowest tool that works: report → remove post → suspend account → defederate domain.
4. Keep a note of why each domain block was made. Six months later you will not remember.