Welcome to the Astronomy on Bluesky moderation team! 🎉
This guide is your starting point for getting up to speed with the project. It provides all the resources, tools, and information you need to help with moderating the feeds.
Moderators of the Astronomy feeds have three core roles:
- Process signups of new users to the feeds.
- Ensure that content posted to the feeds is appropriate and follows the feed rules.
- Help to build a strong, inclusive community of astronomers and astronomy enthusiasts on Bluesky.
These three roles are explained below.
We currently get multiple new signups to the feeds per day. Most of the signup process is automated by the Astrobot, but we still require a final human verification step to ensure that any candidate new posters will adhere to the feed rules.
After asking users to agree to the feed rules and explain why they'd like to sign up, the bot places new signups in the signup feed. We recommend pinning this feed to your home page in the app so that you can keep an eye on it. The bot will also notify us (eventually) if there are outstanding signups.
To validate a signup, you should check the following things:
- That the user meets the description to join the feeds (Rule 1). We also allow organisations relevant to the Astronomy community to join (such as journals).
- That the user does not look likely to break feed content rules. People who already have a history of content scraping or posting AI images are generally not allowed to join without making a strict promise to not do that in the future.
- That the user looks like a legitimate account in general. Bot accounts frequently try to sign up! You can check the user's past post history to see if they look legit.
In general, we usually ask for more information from accounts signing up that have few/no prior posts and/or limited/no information in their profile.
This can then proceed one of two ways:
- The signup is validated by a moderator 'liking' the most recent post by the astrobot in the relevant signup thread (such as this one).
- The signup is cancelled by a moderator replying to the most recent astrobot post with a post starting with 'cancel' (such as in this example).
Particularly while Bluesky grows, we are trying to keep a closer eye on content on the feed, ensuring that everything complies with the feed rules. Tools to deal with things in-app are still under development, but are expected to be finished soon. As moderators, we'll have the following ways to deal with posts that aren't appropriate for the feeds, in order of escalation:
- Friendly reminders: for instance, if someone misses attribution, we can ask them nicely to try and remember it next time. Hopefully most cases can just be this!
- Warnings: more serious issues will incur an official warning, potentially also including hiding the offending post from the feeds.
- Muting/temporary bans: temporary posting to the feed bans are an almost-last-resort. They will also be automatically incurred by accruing too many warnings.
- Bans: in exceptional cases of bad cases or repeat issues, users can be banned from the feeds. This will also be automatically incurred by getting too many mutes.
Exact details and guidelines here will be worked out as we go along.
For now, use your discretion, try to keep more serious things as a last resort, and consult with other moderators if you aren't sure!
The final (and very open) part of moderator's jobs is helping to build our community. That can be what you make it! And as the team expands, we're very open to suggestions for what that could mean.
Simple ways you can help to build the community include...
- Helping people who have questions about the feed
- Encouraging and participating in positive discussions
- Encouraging people to use the subfeeds, helping to better classify posts by type
... and fancier ideas could include things like running an astrophotography contest. Who knows! This one is really open to suggestions and ideas.
Currently, the moderation team includes:
- Emily Hunt (@emily.space - current overseer of the feeds who also leads moderation for now)
- Chris Rolland (@celtuk.bsky.social)
- Kyle Cook (@kwcookastro.bsky.social)
- Markus Pössel (@mpoessel.de)
Remember - not every decision we have to make will be unanimous, and occasionally we will have to make some quite tough decisions. Please always be respectful, even when you disagree with someone!
We have three ways to communicate.
We have a (slightly hacked together) in-app group chat. This is for high-priority communications, such as raising concerns about a user. Because the team is going to expand so much, please try to keep it free of general chit-chat lest it become too spammy. You'll be sent instructions privately on how to join it.
Important note: the in-app chat does not handle links or embedded links to Bluesky posts well. Note that it's hard to share links in (but these bugs are being worked on).
We use snail mail for anything more important, like long form instructions (that's probably how you got sent here in the first place.)
Finally, we also have a Discord! It's shared with the development team, and is a good place to have longer discussions about ideas. Again - you'll be sent instructions on how to join!
As Discord is 'yet another app to join', it isn't mandatory that you're there or check it often - anything important will be communicated via the in-app chat or e-mail as well.
Emily is always available if you have any issues of any kind, over DM or e-mail.