IFTAS is a non-profit organisation founded to support the volunteer moderator community, working to create better social media for all. We are a Delaware (USA) non-profit. Until we are recognised by the IRS as a charity, we are fiscally sponsored by New Venture Fund, a US-based 501(c)3.

The idea for IFTAS started in the summer of 2022, but didn’t really begin coming together until November, as people started pouring into the Fediverse seeking alternatives to Twitter. More and more people were joining, and more and more people were wondering “if this keeps growing, how does moderation scale?” During the same period, servers went offline, some temporarily, some for good. Admin and moderator workloads increased, and communities of thousands sprang into existence seemingly overnight.

As we headed into January, amid a flurry of rapid-fire press coverage good and bad, we solicited responses to a Moderator Needs Assessment, and with results in hand we began recruiting a planning committee. We were lucky to be joined by some very passionate people from around the world who helped us build a team that could create and lead IFTAS, and start the work of defining what activities we should work on.

As we began sketching out the organisation, we tried to get a feel for initial funding opportunities, and we have made three grant applications thus far. Our initial funding is anticipated in August 2023.

IFTAS has been planned around three core activities:

1. Community of Practice – we believe the thousands of volunteer moderators worldwide deserve a means to share best practices, seek advice from each other, and gain access to mental health and wellness resources.
   
2. Group Representation – third parties such as cybersecurity providers, privacy agencies, copyright holders and more can funnel requests and resources through IFTAS, on behalf of its members. IFTAS can serve as a group purchaser for the thousands of service providers operating in the Fediverse.
   
3. Sustainability – we believe we can create a self-sustaining non-profit by soliciting organisational sponsors, and providing moderation-as-a-service to those who need our help.

In the intervening months between our planning activities and our formation, we’ve seen issues around spam account registrations, inauthentic activity and network attacks, CSAM concerns, as well as the closed beta for Bluesky, the addition of ActivityPub to WordPress, the announcement of Meta’s Threads product, and we’ve been discussing these and more in our Matrix chat space. We see some early, low hanging fruit we’d like to tackle:

1. Federated Moderation Tools. There are dozens of ActivityPub platforms and even more client applications for each. Every single one currently has to create their own moderation workflow. This is unsustainable, and IFTAS has begun convening developers to explore modular federated moderation tooling that can be used and reused by any platform or app that wants to do so.
   
2. Regulatory Compliance. Operators and moderators of social media services are subject to numerous territorial and extraterritorial regulation. We are planning to introduce tools to combat CSAM, and to help providers become compliant with numerous regulatory requirements including the EU’s DSA and DMA, the UK’s OSB, and various US requirements.
   
3. Wellness and resilience. We are actively researching mental health resources to make available to our members worldwide, far too many have experienced burnout, exhaustion, or distress as part of their day to day activities keeping communities safe.

Now that we have formed a company and are gearing up to receive funding we need your help! Our Moderator Practice Panel, our Advisory Board, and our volunteer members are soliciting input on federated social media trust and safety needs, and to that end we are releasing an updated Needs Assessment.

If you are a service provider, administrator, moderator, community manager, or otherwise involved or engaged with trust and safety in federated social media, please fill out our Federated Trust and Safety Needs Assessment – it should take you no more then ten minutes, and your responses will be aggregated to help guide the funding and focus of IFTAS as we move forward.

We look forward to your feedback, and to engaging with everyone as we move forward to continue sustaining better social media for all!