Hello!

Two potential feature requests. I'm sorry if I'm retreading some kind of old issue. I also think this is probably one of the longer posts. Thank you kindly should you end up reading it!

TLDR: I got a post moderated and was surprised at what I saw. First suggestion is to ask for a notification that moderation was done to a user's post, and for the user to access or backup the effected post. Second suggestion is to spread the work volume between users/moderators/admin with an easily visible "stress" test that is not dependent on user reviews or comments, plus a more prominent make your own version of the community to encourage greater duplicative communities in PieFed.

Question: What can a user expect when their post is deleted, and their options.

Expectation: Users with posts deleted - for whatever reason - should receive notices that their posts are taken down, a grace period to back up their targeted content, and an easy way to figure out the reason(s).

Reason: If someone is subjected to censorship on PieFed/Lemmy (I'm not saying I was), and their posts are systematically taken down without notice or an option to back up their posts, there should be a grace period to allow them to do so. I think there should also be an easy table to show which posts of theirs were targeted so they can assess for themselves if they are targeted for censorship.

Example: I recently made a post that was designated "Off-Topic". Of course, I'm not here to raise the issue of whether I agree or not here. But what I found was I had no idea my post was deleted because there was no notification. Also, when I did realize my post was deleted, I looked over the post to see that the body was deleted, and I didn't know where to go to refer to the original content to assess further.

I then went to the modlog, and found that the post was deleted with a stated reason. But the link didn't lead to a version that was available for assessment, just to the post with the deleted body, and the comments that were made.

Second Request

Question: Can the community be leveraged to assess a community's stress, and options to relieve that stress?

I believe that the moderator role is already a volunteer position, but the content poster/user is also a volunteer position. There should be a balance to to alert the user if something is changing their posts or not, and whether this is appropriate. I feel that the way the workflow is set up now, the assumption is that the moderator is simply right, and there's not a balance or check to see if the moderator has gone renegade or no longer behaving as expected.

Modlog simply documents the change, but doesn't allow the public to assess if the action steps taken are appropriate. So, for obvious big moves like a moderator deleting every post, the Modlog looks useful. But for subtle changes like light or "soft" censorship, the Modlog doesn't seem able to show that.

Feature Recommendation

Also this flows into another recommendation, and I'm not sure if this is duplicative work (long post, sorry!), the current work flow seems to travel from user by virtue of volume, then to moderator, then to admin. I'd say the greatest points of stress in this workflow appear to be moderator, and then admin to police policy on both users and moderators. As a related requested, I'd suggest to somehow spread the workload more consistently among these roles.

If Piefed builds in a recommendation to users to consider posting to alternative communities or start their own, the hope is to spread that volume. Even if those new communities start slow, they will be in place ready to be added to Topics or Feeds. PieFed is also purpose built to combine similar posts together, and for the so called multi-reddits. PieFed can leverage that better than Lemmy.

I'm thinking out loud here, maybe some color coded heat mapping to just show users in the Modlog whether Mod/Admin staff exercise large volumes of actions to posts, and a recommendation (Grade A to F) based on arbitrary numbers of actions that can be revisited or tweaked, and a prominent easy button to just pick a new community or start a new one on another instance.

Why? I suggest that if a community exceeds an arbitrary number of administrative actions, it's a loose and indirect factor that the community could be experiencing high or excessive volume, and consequently stress. By using such a factor, PieFed users don't necessarily have to worry about inviting other people's reviews of a community - which can be compromised by brigading or other toxic behaviour.

PieFed users instead can be directed to smaller communities or to start their own upfront to create a new culture of building smaller spaces unified by PieFed's Topics or Feeds feature.