IFTAS

You’ll notice we’ve given the project a fresh name this year. We’ve shifted from “Moderator Needs Assessment” to the Social Web Operations Survey because the roles across our independent spaces have grown so much. If you’re managing server infrastructure, handling legal and compliance tasks, dealing with industrialised spam waves, or doing the heavy lifting of frontline content moderation, this survey is built for you.

We run this survey every year for a very simple reason: to gather the hard numbers and real-world feedback we need to support the people building community on the open social web. Your experiences tell us exactly how to structure our guidance, where to prioritise our safety tool development, and how to advocate for resources that keep independent spaces sustainable.

We’re completely network-agnostic. Whether your community lives on ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed), ATProto (Bluesky), Nostr, Matrix, or independent spaces on Discord and Reddit, your feedback is essential. Any platform, any protocol.

We want to hear from the entire spectrum of people keeping these communities and services ticking, from single user instances to major service providers.

We know everyone is stretched for time, so we’ve rebuilt the survey on Tally this year. It’s lightweight, fully mobile-responsive, EU-based, and takes under ten minutes to complete. Every single question is completely optional, and all responses are processed anonymously.

We’ll be running the survey for a full month, so there’s plenty of time to get your thoughts in and pass the link along to your peers.

Take the survey: https://tally.so/r/81MW6k

See the 2025 report: https://about.iftas.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Social-Web-Trust-Safety-Needs-Assessment-Report-2025.pdf

The Social Web Operations Survey (historically the Moderator Needs Assessment) is an annual survey conducted by IFTAS to track the technical workloads, safety pressures, and operational resource gaps across decentral, independent networks (including ActivityPub, ATProto, Nostr, as well as volunteer-driven networks like Reddit and Discord).

Key Benchmarks (From our 2025 Survey)

• 45% of independent platform administrators concurrently juggle three or more major operational responsibilities, acting as systems engineers, community policy creators, and frontline moderators all at once.
• The ecosystem is facing a clear attrition of practitioners with a significant retention drop among administrators and safety team members who hit three to six years of activity without formal structural support.
• Mass-automated spam waves and coordinated disinformation campaigns have officially overtaken individual user report processing as the number one daily time and infrastructure drain on platform operators.
• The average ratio of active moderators to hosted accounts widened significantly over the past data cycle, shifting from 1 per 1,200 accounts to roughly 1 per 3,500 accounts.

We are excited to announce that @ted@an.errant.cloud and @andresmh@hci.social have joined the IFTAS Advisory Board!

Ted is a distinguished leader in open-source technology and digital public interest work. With his deep expertise in fostering privacy, transparency, and ethical tech practices, Ted brings invaluable insight to our mission of building safer, more equitable digital spaces.

Ted’s career spans pivotal roles in both corporate and nonprofit sectors, with a particular focus on open-source solutions that empower users and prioritize ethical use of data. As Director of Product at Mozilla, he led projects that promote user privacy and responsible tech development. Before Mozilla, Ted was the CEO of DocumentCloud, where he helped investigative journalists access critical information through open-source tools that strengthened transparency in the media landscape.

Andrés leads multidisciplinary research teams that build and study technologies designed to help people connect and collaborate in new ways. He is the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Princeton and an assistant professor in Princeton’s Department of Computer Science. He also serves on the board of Crisis Text Line. Andrés and his team have created and deployed social technologies used by millions of people, including the Scratch web site—an award-winning online community for children to learn programming.

At IFTAS, we are committed to creating a decentralised social internet that is safe and inclusive. Andrés and Ted bring a wealth of experience in trust, safety, and decentralised technologies to help steer our initiatives. In joining the advisory board, they will offer strategic guidance on key projects, including our ongoing efforts to develop a robust content classification service for detecting and mitigating harmful content in the Fediverse.

We are thrilled to welcome Andrés and Ted to our team, and we look forward to the exciting collaborations ahead as we continue working toward a safer, more just digital world.

You’ll notice we’ve given the project a fresh name this year. We’ve shifted from “Moderator Needs Assessment” to the Social Web Operations Survey because the roles across our independent spaces have grown so much. If you’re managing server infrastructure, handling legal and compliance tasks, dealing with industrialised spam waves, or doing the heavy lifting of frontline content moderation, this survey is built for you.

We run this survey every year for a very simple reason: to gather the hard numbers and real-world feedback we need to support the people building community on the open social web. Your experiences tell us exactly how to structure our guidance, where to prioritise our safety tool development, and how to advocate for resources that keep independent spaces sustainable.

We’re completely network-agnostic. Whether your community lives on ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed), ATProto (Bluesky), Nostr, Matrix, or independent spaces on Discord and Reddit, your feedback is essential. Any platform, any protocol.

We want to hear from the entire spectrum of people keeping these communities and services ticking, from single user instances to major service providers.

We know everyone is stretched for time, so we’ve rebuilt the survey on Tally this year. It’s lightweight, fully mobile-responsive, EU-based, and takes under ten minutes to complete. Every single question is completely optional, and all responses are processed anonymously.

We’ll be running the survey for a full month, so there’s plenty of time to get your thoughts in and pass the link along to your peers.

Take the survey: https://tally.so/r/81MW6k

See the 2025 report: https://about.iftas.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Social-Web-Trust-Safety-Needs-Assessment-Report-2025.pdf

The Social Web Operations Survey (historically the Moderator Needs Assessment) is an annual survey conducted by IFTAS to track the technical workloads, safety pressures, and operational resource gaps across decentral, independent networks (including ActivityPub, ATProto, Nostr, as well as volunteer-driven networks like Reddit and Discord).

Key Benchmarks (From our 2025 Survey)

• 45% of independent platform administrators concurrently juggle three or more major operational responsibilities, acting as systems engineers, community policy creators, and frontline moderators all at once.
• The ecosystem is facing a clear attrition of practitioners with a significant retention drop among administrators and safety team members who hit three to six years of activity without formal structural support.
• Mass-automated spam waves and coordinated disinformation campaigns have officially overtaken individual user report processing as the number one daily time and infrastructure drain on platform operators.
• The average ratio of active moderators to hosted accounts widened significantly over the past data cycle, shifting from 1 per 1,200 accounts to roughly 1 per 3,500 accounts.

CARIAD is intended to provide new service providers a basic, first step in reflecting the domain blocking activity demonstrated by high volume, well-regarded service providers, as a means to observe the most widely-blocked domains. IFTAS Needs Assessment respondents; community members; and advisors have asked for a shared knowledge of the most commonly blocked domains. The CARIAD list reflects the observed domain blocks affecting roughly 50% of all Mastodon accounts.

CARIAD combines data from two sources:

1. A curated aggregation of the blocks in place on high volume and well-moderated Mastodon service providers. To be eligible for observation, each service provider is reviewed for the following criteria:
   1. Have been in service for at least 6 months;
   2. Themselves have a demonstrable set of domain blocks already in place;
   3. Not themselves appear on the IFTAS denylists.
2. The IFTAS Do Not Interact list, a manually-reviewed list of domains labelled by harm.

iftas-cariad-latest.csv (Mastodon import format)

The permanent file location is:

https://about.iftas.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/iftas-cariad-latest.csv

(The file path includes ‘/2026/06’ which will not change; the current version will overwrite any previous version at this URL)

See Denylist Management Tools for third-party tools to import or implement this denylist.

IFTAS CARIAD Denylist Output – HTML table view of this denylist

The inclusion criteria is a mix of North American, Western European and Southeast Asian service providers. This biases the list in favour of white and global north speech and prejudices, and as such should be used only by new service providers who are comfortable reflecting the aggregated views of white or global north service providers.

Additionally, the sources represent some of the largest service providers, who have generally favoured preserving relationships over blocking speech and content, and therefore are less likely to take action against domains that others may consider worthy of blocking. Larger service providers are also less hesitant to block a small service with few accounts, which may lead to unintended aggregation of this bias.

As new entries become eligible for inclusion, they are reviewed by IFTAS. If approved for inclusion, entries are listed with the majority recommendation. Domains listed on the IFTAS DNI list are included at the IFTAS severity level, regardless of observed sources.

The database and its associated lists is reviewed at least quarterly by IFTAS to ensure the criteria are working as intended, and not causing harm to any community.

As and when domains fail to meet inclusion they will be delisted.

In order to appeal a listing, a request must be sent from an address at the listed domain (eg: abuse@example.com) to our contact address below, with evidence that the issue has been resolved. We may verify the address by sending back a confirmation message asking for a response.

Delisting requests must be sent to the delisting email address, written in English language, in text form: delist-cariad (a) iftas (.) org

Requests are typically investigated and processed within three business days.

All delistings are free of charge.

As an observational list, all listings are observed and reported. Each individual listing will remain on the list for as long as a listing is visible on any of the sources and meets the requisite threshold.

Access to the CARIAD list will be free and available via the domain observatory service. No payment is required for use of the list, nor for listing or delisting requests.

Members of the public may make enquiries about the list, or raise issues, using the email contact@iftas.org