You’ll notice we’ve given the project a fresh name this year. We’ve shifted from “Moderator Needs Assessment” to the Social Web Operations Survey because the roles across our independent spaces have grown so much. If you’re managing server infrastructure, handling legal and compliance tasks, dealing with industrialised spam waves, or doing the heavy lifting of frontline content moderation, this survey is built for you.
We run this survey every year for a very simple reason: to gather the hard numbers and real-world feedback we need to support the people building community on the open social web. Your experiences tell us exactly how to structure our guidance, where to prioritise our safety tool development, and how to advocate for resources that keep independent spaces sustainable.
We’re completely network-agnostic. Whether your community lives on ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed), ATProto (Bluesky), Nostr, Matrix, or independent spaces on Discord and Reddit, your feedback is essential. Any platform, any protocol.
We want to hear from the entire spectrum of people keeping these communities and services ticking, from single user instances to major service providers.
We know everyone is stretched for time, so we’ve rebuilt the survey on Tally this year. It’s lightweight, fully mobile-responsive, EU-based, and takes under ten minutes to complete. Every single question is completely optional, and all responses are processed anonymously.
We’ll be running the survey for a full month, so there’s plenty of time to get your thoughts in and pass the link along to your peers.
Take the survey: https://tally.so/r/81MW6k
See the 2025 report: https://about.iftas.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Social-Web-Trust-Safety-Needs-Assessment-Report-2025.pdf
Media Briefing & Fast Facts
The Social Web Operations Survey (historically the Moderator Needs Assessment) is an annual survey conducted by IFTAS to track the technical workloads, safety pressures, and operational resource gaps across decentral, independent networks (including ActivityPub, ATProto, Nostr, as well as volunteer-driven networks like Reddit and Discord).
Key Benchmarks (From our 2025 Survey)
- 45% of independent platform administrators concurrently juggle three or more major operational responsibilities, acting as systems engineers, community policy creators, and frontline moderators all at once.
- The ecosystem is facing a clear attrition of practitioners with a significant retention drop among administrators and safety team members who hit three to six years of activity without formal structural support.
- Mass-automated spam waves and coordinated disinformation campaigns have officially overtaken individual user report processing as the number one daily time and infrastructure drain on platform operators.
- The average ratio of active moderators to hosted accounts widened significantly over the past data cycle, shifting from 1 per 1,200 accounts to roughly 1 per 3,500 accounts.
