Hey thanks for raising this. We absolutely need moderation and moderators. This is something we will need to work on together as a community - both a Lemmy.nz and Lemmyverse community.

The (new, reddit-flooded) Lemmyverse has already had it's first CSAM widely federated, which was reported here as well as on large communities. The community it was posted to didn't have someone online to resolve it so it stayed up for hours (and was embedded in an innocent looking post). We can ban or remove posts from our instance, but this doesn't remove it for other instances. That only works if the host instance removes it. But ultimately we can't deny we are affected by this, and possibly a higher risk since most of the large instances require users to apply for an account while we currently have open registration (which if things go bad, may mean the other instances stop federating with us).

I'm the only admin so far, but this is not sustainable. We also want extra moderators around to handle things within their communities - including users nominated as responsible for building their community. But we need more users with the ability to moderate, even if this is just to remove posts we obviously don't want here such as the above.

As for more general moderation, this is something that we as a community will need to work together on. I'd like to try an approach similar to Beehaw.org. They have many admin posts talking about this but here is one that outlines what their vision is.

It's long, so you can be forgiven for not reading it, but basically it says that instead of having lots of rules that someone can then be a dick and point to the rules saying they aren't technically breaking any rules, instead you should have fewer, more general rules then encourage discussion in the community as to whether it's the kind of content they want to have in their community. They have disabled downvotes, with the idea being that you can't get away with downvoting a post you don't like, you have to actually have a discussion. I'm open to doing this here if it's what most people want, but I suspect it may not get a lot of support and that's ok too.

So that brings me to me next point - we do have rules, or at least a rule: don't be a dick. Rather than removing content that isn't consistent with the environment we would like, instead we should call out users that are posting content that don't align with our values, or in some instances a private message may be more appropriate.

I'm keen to hear other's thoughts on this approach :)

And another note - we, and the core fediverse nodes we interact with, are not mature enough to handle NSFW content. It's too much of a legal and moderation headache to handle at this stage, so please don't post it. This may change in future depending on how we grow as a community (both local and lemmyverse), but I expect that NSFW content on Lemmy will probably end up in dedicated instances (there are already some).

As for donations, I've had fediservices.nz approach me, and they have provisioned a VPS for us to use. The migration will happen probably in the next 12 hours, and will require downtime. I'm hoping this can be kept to under an hour. If it's looking bad, I'll probably roll back to this server and try again later. So anyway, if you want to donate to running the server then you can donate here: https://opencollective.com/nz-federated-services