Hiya! I grew up online at the tail end of the forums era and the beginning of the walled gardens era, and am used to the online space style of discord servers and subreddits focused around a particular topic. Some thoughts on things that are important for moderation in that style:
One, easy access to a rules area so newcomers can know what the expectations of a space are before participating, and for existing members to be reminded of what rules are in case they forget. This should be able to be changed over time, and editable by anyone with rulemaking authority. When those changes do happen, everyone in that space should be alerted to it to avoid surprises.
One of the failure modes I have seen is when the official rules area ends up being a dead document that doesn’t reflect actual practices in the space, where even those with moderation capacity end up forgetting what is in them. This can cause problems when newcomers reading the rules come away with different expectations of how things should work than what group members actually do, or when there are certain responsibilities that should be carried out by groupmembers that wind up completely forgotten.
Two, a designated way for members to communicate with those who have decisionmaking authority. There’s a lot of different ways to do this. Personally, what I’ve seen work the best is when groups have both a space set aside for public discussions about making changes to a community, where any member can initiate a discussion, and private methods of communication with decisionmakers to bringing up concerns or flag potential rulebreaking for review. Generally, if members aren’t given ways to talk to decisionmakers, that tends to create a feeling of separation from these decisionmakers and less agency in setting community norms.
Obviously, as part of this, decisionmakers need to be able to discuss things with each other, in private. Sometimes there are things that are impolitic to talk about in public, such as how to deal with a given member breaking the rules!
Three, in larger communities, especially ones where decisionmakers cannot reasonably keep up with everything going on in it, a log of moderation actions or concerns brought up about each member in the community. This gives decisionmakers useful context when being asked to do something about someone – have they been a problem before? Do they keep being a problem in this one way? Have they already been talked to about this issue, and kept doing it? This should be kept private from regular members, but with access to it by all decisionmakers.
Depending on the situation, it might be important to set up the log in a way that is guarded against malfeasance from decisionmakers abusing their power. To give a personal example of when this would be relevant: once, I was sexually harassed by the moderator of a community. I documented this and reported it to a higher level of moderation, but the one I happened to get was a friend of his who felt the behavior wasn’t a problem. All other lower level moderators who I was able to get ahold of felt there was nothing they could do if the higher level one didn’t think it was actionable. Years later, I ended up mentioning the issue in public, leading to other higher level mods, ones I didn’t interact with much, asking about it. They decided it was not okay and finally stripped the initial harasser of moderation abilities. However, by this point it was nearly irrelevant, as that harasser had long since gone inactive within the community. Had there been some kind of centralized log where all mods could have seen that I had made this report, guarded against tampering from the one harasser, I might have received action significantly sooner when it mattered.
Fourth, as Brittany said, it’s important for there to be decisionmaker power to kick out problem members. It’s nice when they can talk to people and get them to stop problem behavior in the future, but this isn’t always realistic. Sometimes a potential member is simply a spam acccount, a child too young to be allowed in, or someone who won’t change their behavior even when repeatedly requested. In that case, in order to keep the community space pleasant for other people, decisionmakers need to be able to give them the boot.
This is everything I could think of off the top of my head. Not all community spaces will need this, especially small ones that are based around something other than a shared discussion topic, but this is what the ones I’m part of have needed to be the most successful. I’m really excited by the potential of ATproto to have communities on it!
Reading through many of these I also think that this can be a significant chunk of what the group management layer ends up comprising. Perhaps this is what differentiates different arbiters and helps provide some definition for which one to use? Adding a topic to the discussion for tomorrow for us to go over!