The RapidBlock Project is a grassroots initiative to make Fediverse domain blocking more effective through collective action.

Moderation on the Fediverse is unevenly distributed. Some instance admins devotedly follow the #FediBlock hashtag, blocking abusive servers within hours of their first appearance on the network. Others wait until their own users file a report. Still others do nothing at all.

This uneven distribution of moderation allows abusive instances to do significant psychological harm. Abusive instances are a fast-moving target; setting up a new Mastodon instance takes only an hour or two, as does resetting an instance to give it a new domain name. This gives abusers a substantial time window in which there are a lot of available victims to target.

The RapidBlock Project is something different: humans are in the loop at every step of the decision-making process, and the only thing that is automated is the actual propagation of the decisions. Moderation is hard, especially good moderation. Moderation is a full-time job, and many Fediverse admins aren't taking up that mantle of responsibility. We are trying to build a central moderation team with a clear, published rationale for our blocking criteria and a clear dispute process for remediating mistaken blocks.

We have #fediblock to let others know of bad people or instances, but some people find it hard to scroll through a ton of posts and verify the validity of the post. Sometimes an instance isn't bad, but has stuff you may not want to see or is inappropriate for your instance, such as porn.

By "bad instance(s)," I mean instances that are generally bigoted, pedophilic, and/or host genuinely harmful content.