T&S Across the Fediverse: ROOST at FOSSY 2026
Written by
Cassidy James Blaede
Published
Trust and safety are critical for all online platforms, but particularly challenging to tackle for smaller teams building on distributed protocols. Last weekend I attended FOSSY (“Free and Open Source Software Yearly”) on behalf of ROOST to chat with and learn from fellow open source developers—particularly those building a network of interoperable sites and apps known collectively as the fediverse. I came away energized by the reception to ROOST projects and the excitement of developers to learn about and evolve the approach to trust and safety across the open social web.
While I’ve attended plenty of open source conferences and meetups in the past—including FOSDEM and ATmosphereConf on behalf of ROOST—I wasn’t sure what exactly to expect from FOSSY. I’d heard it described as becoming “the FOSDEM of North America,” but that the relatively smaller size means around 75% of the attendees are “FOSS famous,” or known figures from free and open source projects. This checked out, and overall I had a wonderful time both catching up with folks I knew and meeting new people in person for the first time.
FediCon & the fediverse
This year FediCon joined FOSSY as a sort of mini-conference, occupying one of several tracks for two of the four total days. This meant two days dedicated to talks, demos, and discussions with people building the open social web known as the fediverse. If you’re unfamiliar, the “fediverse” is a community-coined term that refers to an open social network made up of thousands of interoperable sites and services built with many different software platforms, but all on the ActivityPub protocol. Platforms like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops, WriteFreely, Bandwagon, NodeBB, Bookwyrm, PeerTube, Lemmy, Flipboard, Threads, Ghost, WordPress, Discourse, and many more are part of the fediverse; millions of people using these platforms can find, follow, and interact with people and content across the entire network.
During FediCon, I met and hung out with co-author of ActivityPub Evan Prodromou, Pixelfed and Loops creator Daniel Supernault, WriteFreely creator Matt Baer, Bandwagon creator Ben Pate, Nuages developer Django Doucet, NodeBB co-founder Julian Lam, and several others. A recurring theme was that as much as people building on ActivityPub love the potential of the protocol, everyday folks shouldn’t have to care or even know about it; their favorite social apps and sites should just work together as part of this open social web.
This sentiment reminded me of trust and safety (T&S): it’s critically important, but most people don’t know about the tooling and work that goes into it in the background. This was true even among FediCon attendees; after several conversations about ROOST specifically and T&S broadly, I asked the room how many would consider themselves to be familiar with the field of “trust and safety.” Out of around thirty people, only two raised their hands. I proposed and presented a “T&S Crash Course” lightning talk to help explain the topic and types of tools to the room.
After the talk, trust and safety became a noticeably pervasive topic across conversations and even panels. For example, during the “Building the Fediverse” panel, the panelists were asked “What bottleneck has caused you the most trouble, and what should new builders do before success attacks them?” Julian Lam identified the importance of scaling trust and safety tooling and operations, and open source projects from ROOST as a way to do it:
When we are faced with something that needs done more than once or twice, we usually build a bot or a script so that we don’t ever have to do it again! What happens when it works is the stuff that you can’t automate away—and what I’m getting at is trust and safety: the actual social aspect of social networks is beautiful, complicated, and messy, and you can’t automate it away… It’s that messy messiness that we’re all desperately craving some sort of technical solution to. And that’s where I point to ROOST as maybe that silver bullet.
Similarly, during the FOSSY-wide panel “Beyond the Walled Gardens: What the Fediverse Is and Why You Belong There,” an audience member asked how the fediverse can keep people safe when it’s becoming easier for people to spin up their own servers from which they can spread harm. Evan Prodromou helped frame a bit of the history behind T&S culture across the fediverse, and acknowledged the ongoing work:
We have on the fediverse a culture of very manual, artisanal trust and safety management. And that comes from a number of vulnerable communities—LGBTQ, political dissidents—who have very little trust in automated systems; they know that when they were on [other platforms] that those automated systems worked against them, and did not take them into account. So what's happened is that on the fediverse we're doing it one-by-one, by hand.
I think that we have a chance to be building some of these trust and safety systems—some really cool systems like ROOST are coming onto the fediverse and we're really pretty excited about those—but we are building them, and get to put our priorities and our values into them so that we're not ignoring people who deserve attention and deserve trust and safety. It’s gonna be step-by-step; we have to build up trust in the trust and safety.
With open source tools like Coop, different communities, platforms, and servers can spend more time focusing on developing their specific policies and protections. And the beauty of Coop as an adaptable, self-hostable tool is that it’s super flexible: it can handle one-by-one user reports like platforms like Mastodon do today, but it can also help teams grow their T&S operation with an automated rules engine driven by a powerful signals library—all completely in control of the team deploying it.
If you want to learn more about trust and safety—especially why it goes beyond just “moderation”—I encourage you to check out the T&S Crash Course slides, the Trust and Safety Professionals Association (TSPA) curriculum and library, and the Trust & Safety Teaching Consortium curriculum.
Open source tools
If you got this far and don’t know exactly what ROOST actually does: first, I applaud you for reading this much; second, let me give you a quick overview. We’re Robust Open Online Safety Tools, a 501c3 nonprofit that builds, releases, and maintains open source online safety tools as a public good. We don’t host a platform or run T&S services ourselves; we work with everyone from tiny indie developers to Silicon Valley giants on critical building blocks for safety that protect hundreds of millions of users. This includes Coop, a review and moderation dashboard, and Osprey, a high-performance investigation and rules engine.
ROOST is about open source tools, not education—but sometimes we help educate and share resources for people, like those building the future of the web and social experiences, to ensure that T&S is a core consideration. And then crucially, thanks to the world-changing power of open source, each of these platforms building on the social web has access to production-proven tools so they can focus on their unique needs rather than rebuilding the same foundational infrastructure over and over again.
Our focus on building an online safety commons through open source resonated with several developers of fediverse platforms at FediCon; they were thrilled to be able to integrate with ROOST projects like Coop and Osprey to deliver or level up their trust and safety tooling. I look forward to continuing many conversations about how the fediverse can be made safer thanks to the adoption of open source projects from ROOST.
What comes next
Today, fediverse platforms can already integrate with ROOST projects like Coop in order to introduce or augment their trust and safety tooling—and we’re aware of plans from multiple platforms to do exactly that. We believe this is a great first step to begin using real industry-tested tooling for moderation rather than building out nearly identical bespoke solutions while discovering all of the same problems that have already been solved. It enables these platforms to start with a simple human moderation console while getting multiple queues and queue routing, moderator wellness features, appeals handling, and metrics and reporting for free while also opening up the doors for them to mature their T&S operation with third-party integrations, automated enforcement rules, user strikes, bulk actioning, and comprehensive child safety features.
However, we’re acutely aware that just as it doesn’t make sense for every single platform to build these tools from scratch, it might not make sense for every server on the fediverse to have to duplicate the entire trust and safety pipeline themselves—for example, single-user instances or small family-and-friends servers are still exposed to everything and everyone on the fediverse, but don’t have a dedicated T&S team to keep their users safe. The folks building the fediverse are thinking about this as well, which is why work is ongoing on specifications for Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers (FASPs); we believe there’s room for multiple trusted T&S FASPs to exist across the fediverse, and that our open source tools would be a perfect fit for these service providers. Then, fediverse servers could opt into one or more T&S FASPs to supplement their own moderation, keeping everyone safer across the fediverse.
If you’re excited about building integrations between fediverse platforms and open source T&S tooling—or you’re interested in contributing to T&S tools themselves—we invite you to get involved with the ROOST community. Everything we do is community-driven, public, and released as open source. You can join the #fediverse channel in our Discord server, collaborate on code, issues, and discussions across the @roostorg GitHub organization, or simply reach out to @roost@hachyderm.io on the fediverse. Let’s work together to build a shared online safety commons to keep everyone safe across the open social web.