Understanding Community-Level Blocklists in Decentralized Social Media

Abstract

Community-level blocklists are key to content moderation practices in decentralized social media. These blocklists enable moderators to prevent other communities, such as those acting in bad faith, from interacting with their own—and, if shared publicly, warn others about communities worth blocking. Prior work has examined blocklists in centralized social media, noting their potential for collective moderation outcomes, but has focused on blocklists as individual-level tools. To understand how moderators perceive and utilize community-level blocklists and what additional support they may need, we examine social media communities that run Mastodon, an open-source microblogging software built on the ActivityPub protocol. We conducted (1) content analysis of the community-level blocklist ecosystem, and (2) semi-structured interviews with twelve Mastodon moderators. Our content analysis revealed wide variation in blocklist goals, inclusion criteria, and transparency. Interviews showed that moderators balance proactive safety, reactive practices, and caution about false positives when using blocklists for moderation. They noted challenges and limitations in current blocklist use, suggesting design improvements like comment receipts, category filters, and collaborative voting. We discuss the fragmented and opaque infrastructure of decentralized moderation, highlighting the hybrid strategies moderators use to navigate high-stakes defederation. We conclude by identifying key socio-technical challenges—such as trust and safety paradoxes—that future collaborative tools must address.