Getting started
Ozone is a web-based moderation interface that allows you to run your own Labeler service, and review and content reports efficiently. This guide will walk you through installing and using Ozone.
Installing Ozone
Ozone should be run on a dedicated VPS, from a cloud provider like OVHcloud, DigitalOcean, or Vultr. 1-2GB of memory and 1-2 CPU cores is sufficient to get started.
To install Ozone, refer to HOSTING.md in the Ozone GitHub repository.
Before setting up your Ozone service you should create a new account on the network, separate from your main account. This is the account that subscribers to your labeler will interact with: accounts for labelers appear differently in Bluesky than normal accounts.
After completing the server-side installation, you can access the Ozone web interface by navigating to your server's IP address or domain name in a web browser:
From here, you can begin configuring your Labeler service.
Configuring Ozone
First, provide the credentials of the account you created for your labeler service:
Make sure to provide your full handle, including the .bsky.social suffix (or your custom domain if applicable).
Next, you'll be prompted to update your account registration with the PLC, to mark this account as a moderation service. This will trigger an email verification. Verify that you are using the correct account and domain name, and then provide the verification code:
Finally, confirm that you will be using this account as a labeler service. This publishes an AT Record of the type app.bsky.labeler.service to your account.
Now your Ozone instance is set up and ready to use!
Submitting and managing reports
Now, you'll create and action an example moderation report. In Bluesky or another application, sign back in to a regular (non-labeler) account. Then, navigate to the account page for your labeler service.
Click the "Subscribe to Labeler" button to subscribe your account to the labeler service. This allows your account to submit reports to this labeler, and receive labels from it.
Next, navigate to a post you wish to report, and select "Report Post":
Because this is just a tutorial, we're going to report a post from Bluesky's own team for being too enthusiastic. This would not normally be a reason to report a post, but it works for our example!
Fill out the reporting interface as desired. Make sure select your labeler as the moderation service to send the report to. Then, submit the report.
Now, return to the Ozone interface. You should see the new report listed in the Reports section:
Click on the report to view its details. From here, you can review the reported content and take appropriate moderation actions.
In this case, the most straightforward action is to acknowledge the report without taking further action. Select "Ackonwledge" from the drop-down, provide a note, then submit the action. You can use keyboard shortcuts to speed up moderation actions — for example, S for Submit.
If you had wanted to mute the user for subscribers to your labeler, you could have selected "Mute" from the action drop-down instead. Refer to Ozone Concepts for an explanation of each action.
You can review the event stream of reports and actions in the Events section:
Or, use the Repositories section to search reports by user, content, or action:
Next steps
You now have an understanding of the Ozone moderation flow. Ozone also allows you to create additional user accounts with different permissions, to help manage your moderation workload. To aggregate the data from your Ozone instance, see the #OzoneInsights feed for solutions.