Ability to exchange updates about Reports for Users and Moderators

[ThisIsMissEm]

Motivation

At present, Mastodon does not provide any feedback to users in response to reports, the only feedback that is provided is to the reported account in the form of an Account Warning, if the moderator chooses to make use of that feature.

There is no feedback provided to users who have reported content as to action being taken about their report. The side-effects of a report are of course potentially visible to users, but that requires them to manually follow up on accounts and statuses. The lack of a feedback loop for reporting often leaves users feeling like they're yelling into the void, unsure if their reports are actually seen by moderators (local and remote).

There is an additional related feedback loop when a report is federated in nature, where the local moderation team on the source server of the report do not receive any feedback that the remote server is presently working to resolve the report or that the report has been resolved, or that the report has been rejected for some reason (e.g., it's not against their server rules).

The lack of a feedback loop for moderation teams on reports often further exacerbates the issue, leading to claims of servers having "poor moderation" on the #FediBlock hashtag, when the actual situation is just that there is no feedback loop, and moderation styles and policies vary between instances. e.g., some servers may not have moderators online in the source server's timezone, so there is a delay in them even seeing the report.

Pitch

The proposal is to provide:

• a feedback mechanisms for local users to receive updates on reports of local and remote accounts/statuses
• a feedback mechanism for local moderators on federated reports, such that actions from remote moderators are visible in some form to the local moderators to allow them to further decide how to proceed.

ActivityPub Implications

Currently reports are federated as a Flag activity, which does not currently have any defined feedback loop, i.e., there's no "inReplyTo" or anything like that, so Flag activities are effectively a fire-and-forget activity in ActivityPub.

I have opened an ActivityPub / ActivityStreams issue to start discussing a resolution to this at protocol level, which would then follow through to software level implementations: w3c/activitystreams#609

[ThisIsMissEm]

This has previously been requested in vaguer terms in various issues such as #18154 and #31081.

#31081 relates primarily to enabling communication between moderation teams, likely through exchanging Note activities with some sort of addressing and context related to the Flag activity.

There's also other issues I've seen that have talked about the effects or desires, but in connection with other matters.

[ThisIsMissEm]

In #18154 I discussed some potential activities that may relate to Reports / Flag activities, specifically:

• Ability to Accept / TentativeAccept / Reject a Flag activity; This would improve the timezone delay, since you would see that a remote moderation team has seen the report; Rejecting a Flag activity could be used for the case of "this doesn't violate our servers rules"

• An undefined "update" activity for a Flag that provides a resolution to a Flag activity and consequently informs the reporting server that the remote moderation team has taken all the action that they are going to on a report.

During the SWICG issue triage, we also discussed potentially having updates to other objects contain some sort of "in reply to" or "context" that references the Flag activity when a change is made in relation to a report.

[betsys]

I would like the option to resolve a report and CC the note to the person reporting. That would save some typing and clicking as right now we have to manually DM the reporter.