mssgs gives content moderation to the communities themselves

Brummen, the Netherlands, 4 August 2026

mssgs, the independent Dutch group chat application, has released a Reported Content queue that places moderation decisions with the members of the community concerned rather than with a central team. Moderators work from a shared queue in which each report carries a review deadline and the current state of the vote.

The queue is available in Moderator Tools in the desktop application for macOS, Windows and Linux from version 14.0.30, released on 4 August 2026.

Reports are reviewed by the community they came from

A member can report a message, a direct message, a community or another member. The report is routed to the moderators of the community in which the content appeared, who see the item, its review deadline and how their colleagues have voted so far.

Communities on mssgs already govern themselves in other respects, including shared ownership and permissions set per role or per member. Moderation follows the same principle: the people who set a community’s standards are the people who apply them.

The evidence outlives the deletion

When content is reported, it is stored as it appeared at that moment. Deleting a message after it has been reported therefore does not end the review, which removes the most obvious way to escape one.

A reporter may attach up to ten surrounding messages, so a moderator sees the exchange the reported message belonged to rather than a single line taken out of it. That addition shipped on 5 August 2026 with version 14.0.31.

What the reporter and the reported party can see

A Reports section in Settings records what a member has reported and how each report was handled, alongside any reports made about their own content. A report is no longer something that disappears once it is sent.

Blocking is available from a profile, a message or a direct message, and every blocked account is listed in Settings so it can be reviewed or reversed later.

A central moderation team scales badly and takes too long to understand a community. The members of a group already know what is normal in it and what is not, so the decision belongs to them. Our part is to make sure they see the whole exchange, that the evidence survives a deletion, and that the vote is in the open.

René van Sweeden, founder of mssgs

Availability

The Reported Content queue is included in mssgs at no cost and appears in Moderator Tools for members holding the relevant permissions. Background on the moderator role is published at mss.gs/en/moderators.

mssgs is free to use, carries no advertising, and hosts all data in the European Union. Downloads for every platform are available at mss.gs/en/downloads.