Summary

Rather than combining all reports into a single report inbox, we should allow users to select whether they are reporting to mods or admins, and we should split reports into different inboxes based on that selection.

Motivation

The current approach has some shortcomings:

Users are not currently able to bypass mods and report directly to admins - this may allow mods to conceal instance rule breaking in specific communities
Admins are not aware of community rules, so they may wish to take no action for most community rule breaking reports. However, if an admin resolves such a report, the relevant community mods most likely never see it.
Different instances may have different rules, but somebody resolving a report on one instance will resolve it for other instances as well, thus potentially resulting in missed reports.
Mods might take local action on a report and mark it as resolved even in cases where a user should be banned from the entire instance. In this case, admins are very unlikely to see the report.

Guide-level explanation

Whe creating reports, users are able to select if it’s a mod report, or an admin report
Instead of the current single report inbox, there will be three different kinds of inboxes:
- Admin reports - show all reports sent to admins (only visible to admins)
- Mod reports - show all reports sent to mods for any communities the user moderates
- All reports - Shows a read-only view of all (admin and mod) reports, only visible to admins
  - This would allow admins to still keep an eye on mod actions on their instance if they wish

The UI wouldn’t need to change for mods, but for admins, there would be a new selection at the top of the reports page (the “mod reports” tab would only be visible if the admin is also a mod in any community):

Resolving reports should be more granular
- Reports in the “admin reports” tab can only be resolved for admins of the local instance
  - To reduce overhead, banning reported user on the user’s home instance + removing reported content should automatically resolve reports for remote admins as well
- Reports in the “mod reports” tab can only be resolved by relevant mods. Admins can only reoslve these if they are also explicit mods in the relevant communities.
  - To reduve overhead, banning reported user on the communities instance + removing reported content should automatically resolve reports for mods as well
- Reports in the “all reports” tab can not be resolved, they are only there for a read-only overview
  - This is to prevent cases of admins accidentally preventing mods from moderating according to their own community rules
  - Admins can still always explicitly take over communities by making themselves mods, in this way, they are able to handle mod reports for any abandoned communities, etc

Reference-level explanation

In the UI, changes are needed for both reporting as well as the reports inbox views
In the database and API, we should split reports by intended audience
Federation needs to be changed as well in order to allow distinguishing the report target audience

Drawbacks

It might make reporting slightly more confusing for end users - the mod/admin distinction might not be fully clear to all.

Rationale and alternatives

Alternatively, we could make reporting even more granular. It would be possible to allow users to select only a specific instances admins as the intended report audience, for example. However, I think this has several downsides:

Makes the report UI even more confusing
Potentially takes away valuable information from other admins (imagine a user only reports CSAM to their own instances admins, while leaving the offending post authors home admins in the dark)

Prior art

Most other social networks allow users to select whether they are reporting a violation of community rules, or site rules as whole.

Unresolved questions

Does ActivityPub properly support splitting up reports like this?

RFC to split reports into admin and mod reports