Attention all #newhere!

Thar be #trolls in #Diaspora!

Unlike other social networks like the soon-to-be-deceased #GooglePlus, Diaspora and other federated social networks don't have a central authority to perform #moderation. Mostly that means that there are a few lost souls whose behavior could be described as troll-like. You may find content you don't like, offensive and unwelcome comments on your posts, etc. This is an unpleasant side-effect of Diaspora's design: the platform doesn't need to bow to the rules and regulations of a single government, making it much harder to censor content. (Individual pods are subject to regulations of the government where they are hosted; but the network as a whole isn't.)

I've been trolled! What to do?

You have a few choices.

• You can go to the user's profile page and Ignore them. Ignored users won't be able to follow you or see your posts, comment on your posts, or @mention you in their posts or comments, although they can still comment on posts of others you follow. Like an old flame, there's no way to avoid crossing paths again.

• You can report a post or comment. This is actually a bit tricky to understand. Let's say your account is hosted on diaspora.x.com and the troll has an account hosted on diaspora.y.com. If you report the troll, the message goes to the administrator of diaspora.x.com where they are given the option of removing it from your pod. The content will still exist on other pods (remember the thing about no centralized moderation?).

• You can reach out to the administrator of (in the above example) diaspora.y.com and make the case that the user should be banned. Realize that the troll still may open a new account somewhere else, and several trolls have been known to do this.

This is totally unacceptable!

OK. But that's also the way the system works. You can feel free to make suggestions for improving the system, or better yet, write a fix submit a pull request and make it available to everyone. I've advocated for some kind of machine-learning algorithm to help manage unpleasant content, but I haven't sat down to build one yet.

Thanks for signing up, and I hope you can see past the trolls and make some new friends here!

(Please comment on corrections, opinions, etc.)