I agree with all that and I don’t blame you for leaving there if that’s the experience you had. I do think even the best moderation will have bias. It’s also a thankless job. I’ve done it before on Facebook and the amount of work it takes to resolve a conflict it a bit crazy for an unpaid gig. The medium of text isn’t well suited to it unless you’re retired or something and have lots of free time. And that’s also the people who in good faith genuinely feel they’ve been wronged for not being given carte blanche in the group.

Automoderation can be helpful in detecting patterns and alleviating work from the moderators so they can spend time with their families* etc. I would say to anyone who is frustrated by that to think of it from the moderators perspective: “if I’m still in the automod queue, they must be really under pressure”. That kind of empathy online would make the role of moderator a bit more appealing to someone like myself, at least.

I agree with you about federation. It seems to be a really good solution, although it’s in its infancy and discoverability and accessibility are still an issue.

• the reason I left those platforms and moderation was because it began taking away quality time with my family. Before I quit completely, I had to make fast moderation decisions because there were so many users relative to moderators. I’m sure I made plenty of bad decisions.

I seem to recall reading postvagnen, a Swedish railway forum, that had a tree structure in 2005 or so

Maybe I don’t frequent enough to notice that happening.

At least he has made the code freely available for others to host their own instance with their own moderation rules/style.