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Hello, fediverse! We’re ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools), a nonprofit that makes open source trust & safety infra tools.
We recently openly released Osprey, the automated rules engine and investigation tool used in production by Discord and Bluesky.
We were at FOSDEM. And now we’re finally here on Mastodon! 👋
You can continue to follow @roost.tools as a direct bridge from our Bluesky account, but we’ll post more specifically for the fediverse directly over here, now.
@roost.tools @roost I wonder how you compare to the OpenKAT project.
@JeroenBaten OpenKAT looks more like a security tool; ROOST is about building online safety/trust & safety tools.
@cassidy and @Whyhiannabelle gave a talk that includes a sort of crash course on Trust & Safety field if you’re interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOoUfaInsaE
or
@JeroenBaten the gist is that T&S focuses on reducing and preventing harms to the users on platforms; things like child sexual abuse materials, terrorism and violent extremism content, non-consensual intimate imagery, grooming, and other forms of illegal and harmful content.
Every platform has to handle these harms, but oftentimes the existing tooling is proprietary, expensive, and hard to access. So every platform ends up reinventing the exact same tools: moderation dashboards, investigation tools, automated rules engines, etc. At ROOST, we’re building open source tools to form a new online safety commons that any organization or platform—regardless of size—can then utilize and contribute back to while focusing on their platform’s unique needs.
> used in production by Discord and Bluesky.
That doesn't make for a good start, marketing-wise. Especially with reference to FOSDEM, where Bluesky's boss was removed from the conference by visitor protest last year 😅.
@nik@toot.teckids.org @roost I guess Linux is off to a bad start since it’s used by those platforms, too. Same with any open source cryptography they use!
…Or, maybe we should celebrate that these large platforms are coming together to use and contribute to open source solutions that then benefit smaller and more open platforms. Like Matrix, which is now using Osprey as well—which wouldn’t have been possible without Discord open sourcing their tooling through ROOST.
@roost (also, my understanding is that Jack isn’t involved with Bluesky at all any more; and the Bluesky and ATproto folks I’ve worked with have been very cool and passionate about delivering on the open and distributed promise of ATproto)
@roost ATproto folks were all over at FOSDEM, and we had great conversations with them and ActivityPub people. We’re all on the same team as far as I’m concerned, especially when it comes to keeping people safe from scams, CSAM, child grooming, violent extremism… all the things Osprey and other ROOST tools are explicitly designed to combat.
