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: another admin reports 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 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