Disclaimer: I administrate multiple Sharkey instances and am one of the project maintainers, so I'm likely quite biased. Please take my opinions with a grain of salt!
- I've used Mastodon, Akkoma, and various Misskey forks (Calckey, FireFish, and now Sharkey). The former felt very much like a corporate platform, complete with the "polished feel" you'd expect. Someone unfamiliar could easily mistake it for Twitter. Akkoma is quite the opposite - it feels like an indie software hosting forgotten subcultures in a quiet corner of the internet. Misskey-based software is somewhere in the middle, and feels more like an MMO than a social network sometimes.
- Mastodon moderation is clearly geared towards structured and (semi-)professional moderation teams. The mod tooling supports coordination between multiple moderators and records detailed audit logs for quick catch-up on a particular user's history of staff interactions. Akkoma, again, feels like moderating a classic PHP forum backend. The tooling options are either high-level and barebones, or low-level but extremely powerful. Misskey forks vary, a lot. Vanilla Misskey has relatively poor moderation support, and is clearly meant for communities with a fairly "hands-off" approach. Calckey/FireFish improve this somewhat, and Sharkey has put moderation as a key focus with support for granular restrictions beyond just "silence or suspend". Community wise, I feel that Mastodon users tend to over-report, and Mastodon admins under-moderate. Akkoma users rarely report anything, but admins set up intricate MRF rules to enforce detailed restrictions and limits. Misskey users report about as much as Mastodon users, while admins often over-moderate and jump directly to instance-level restrictions in response to minor user-level issues.
- I do, at least in general. The quality of moderation on fedi is a mixed bag. A few instances do very well, some do well enough, and many more just moderate the bare minimum or not at all. I regularly see users complain of harassment from sources that have been known for years. No qualified moderation team should allow federation with
poa.st, for example, and yet many do. But Beehaw's staff have shown a commitment to their roles, and the community has consistently backed them up with reliable reporting and a solid effort to maintain the community health. I think our people could do very well in the larger fediverse space.
I discontinued my own evaluation and asked the doctor to purge my records. It sucks to lose all that progress - especially after waiting decades for it, but I just can't take the risk right now. At least he was understanding and didn't object to deleting my file.