Federation incidents

Status: placeholder. This guide will be written before launch.

Sooner or later an admin from another instance will email you about a calendar on yours, or one of your calendar owners will report something on another instance. These are the moments when "running an instance" turns out to also be "doing diplomacy." This guide is about the order of operations.

Planned scope

• The inbound case, out of band: another admin emails you about content hosted on your instance. What to ask them (specifics, links, what they've already done), what to evaluate (is this a CoC issue, a federation-policy issue, or a misunderstanding), what to do (talk to your calendar owner before acting, unless the situation requires otherwise)
• The inbound case, in product: a report filed on another instance and forwarded to yours. This one does not start with you. It lands in the owning calendar's moderation queue first, and reaches your admin queue when the owner acts on it — dismissing a report escalates it to you rather than closing it, so nothing gets buried, but you are the second reader, not the first. The email case above is a different path with different timing, and the two are easy to confuse when both are in flight about the same calendar
• The outbound case: one of your users reports content on another instance. What you can actually do (defederate, hide, encourage the calendar owner to unfollow), what you can't (force the other instance to act), how to communicate the limit to the reporter without sounding helpless
• The order of operations for almost every case: investigate, talk to the calendar owner on your side, decide, act, document. Skipping the "talk to the calendar owner" step is the single most common admin mistake
• When to defederate quickly without a full conversation: legal exposure, ongoing harassment, content that legally cannot be hosted. These are real and rare
• Documenting the incident — not for performance, for your own memory. The third time the same instance comes up is the time you'll wish you had notes
• The "I made a call and I'm not sure it was right" question. Adjusting in the open beats pretending you didn't change your mind