Recently I came across a community that I wanted to let the moderators of Blåhaj Lemmy (my home instance) know about, since it seemed likely to be the type of community that this instance would want to defederate from. On Lemmy’s web UI, I saw no button to report the community, so I arbitrarily chose a post and reported it, explaining that I intended to report the community as a whole. Blåhaj Lemmy has now defederated from that community, but I also got a direct message from the owner of the community I reported. That was jarring, since I hadn’t intended for that person to see my report. (I’m fine, though—the message I got was clearly not to harass me or anything; it was just explaining that the post I reported didn’t break the rules of the community (of course) and thus wasn’t removed from the community.)

It seems to me that when a report is created, it can get sent to up to three parties:

• the moderators of the community the post is in,
• the moderators of the instance that community belongs to, and
• the moderators of the home instance of the user creating the report.

Is there a way to choose which of these parties to send a report to? In this case, when I report a community, I don’t want the moderators of the community to see that I’m reporting that community. I can also imagine cases where someone would want to report an entire instance, and of course that kind of report should just get sent to the home instance of the user doing the reporting and not to the instance being reported.

I’d guess that such functionality doesn’t currently exist, since I didn’t see it in the web UI. Is it a requested feature? Is it being worked on currently, or planned to be implemented? Right now, I suppose a workaround is to just direct message the instance admins the next time something like this occurs. I think this solution is far from ideal, though, since it is less obvious and could involve extra effort if there are multiple admins or moderators to send the report to.