Decentered

Decentered S1E5: Building Trust & Safety, with Jaz Michael-King

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Welcome back to the Decetered podcast! As alwys, we’re overjoyed to have a new episode out for you to listen to. If you liked this one, please check out our other episodes! Our theme today is Trust & Safety.

This week, we’re sitting down with Jaz Michael-King, the founder of Independent Federated Trust and Safety (IFTAS). We’ve written about the organization and some of their efforts in the past, but we wanted to check in on what’s happening behind the scenes.

Show Notes

Jaz covered a huge amount of ground with us, so this episode’s notes are longer than usual.

Background and Experience

• Jaz is a Welsh immigrant living in the United States, and moved to the US just as the dot-com boom was happening.
• Jaz came to the Fediverse with the 2017 Mastodon migration, and started toot.wales to foster the usage of the Welsh language online.
• Much of Jaz’s experience in building his online community is based on his experience in working in medical IT and handling sensitive information in the Non-Profit world. The idea of providing a service while dealing with risk factors and potential liabilities informed a lot of his decisions.
• As Jaz ran his server, he was exposed to a lot of the problems other admins had to deal with. A lot of them exchanged notes and talked about how they were dealing with specific issues.
• Jaz ended up using his knowledge of Legal Compliance for things like GDPR to answer questions for other admins. This slowly turned into lists of advice, then a doc, then an entire pool of resources.
• Fedifence was a first attempt to put these resources together into a common project.

Starting IFTAS

• The November 2022 migration pushed Jaz to codify much of what he had been writing about, and try to put an entity together.
• Incorporation was super hard, as fiscal sponsors were worried about the liability aspect of dealing with spam, harassment, CSAM, and more.
• “The deeper we went into conversation with [the fiscal sponsor], the less they wanted to do with it.”
• IFTAS had to incorporate themselves with only a few days left to go on the grant timer.

Ongoing Efforts

• First order of business was to put out a Needs Assessment Survey for admins and moderators, got insights from over 200+ servers.
• Biggest request from the Survey? Tools to fight and report CSAM. They are being built.
• Another big ask: mental health & wellness resources for moderators.
• IFTAS will soon offer stipends to moderators in the community.
• FediCheck is an IFTAS-sponsored “Denylist Management App”, which lets admins subscribe to a curated “worst of the worst” denylists.
• Working on compliance documentation to help admins navigate the EU’s Digital Services Act, along with other local legislation down the line.
• Working with Tall Poppy, a digital safety service, to help folks in the Fediverse that need it.

Thanks for checking out the interview! Jaz was a delight to talk to, and we really learned a lot in the time that we sat down with him.

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