Investigate the utility of instance actors for instance‐level moderation notes

[marrus-sh]

Right now Mastodon’s moderation capabilities are mainly targeted towards individual users, not instances. However, most contemporary fediverse instances have their own account, e.g. @[email protected] which is used for a variety of special federation purposes. (This might actually be required for “secure mode”.)

Assigning notes, tags, etc. to these accounts may be one avenue for increasing instance‐level moderation potential, but I’ll need to dig into the specifics to see how it works.

[marrus-sh]

Instance actors introduced here: mastodon/mastodon#11321.

[marrus-sh]

By the looks of it, there is no reliable way to identify the instance actor for all instances. We can easily cover the Mastodon use‐case via the @[email protected] convention (a few other instances use this too) but AFAIK there is no way to guarantee that this user exists, even in secure mode. (Other instances may use actors at different locations.)