How ROOST is Advancing Online Safety (opens in new tab)
Discord argues that online safety should be built through shared, open-source infrastructure rather than isolated corporate systems. Its donated rules engine, Osprey, lets platforms detect suspicious behavior and harmful activity in real time, while ROOST develops and maintains tools for broad industry adoption. Early adoption, including by Bluesky, suggests this model can raise baseline safety standards across the internet. ## The Need for Shared Safety Tools - Nearly 100 million people use Discord daily, generating hundreds of millions of events that must be evaluated for threats. - Generative AI has increased the scale and sophistication of phishing, deepfakes, and coordinated abuse. - Smaller platforms often lack the resources to build effective trust-and-safety systems from scratch. - ROOST aims to make proven safety technologies open, shared, and auditable. ## How Osprey Works - Osprey is a real-time rules engine for event processing and behavioral analysis. - It can evaluate logins, messages, account creation, content posts, and platform-specific actions. - Safety teams write rules in a simple language and deploy them without engineering dependencies. - The engine produces transparent decisions indicating whether activity is safe, suspicious, or malicious. - Discord runs thousands of rules across hundreds of action types. - Investigation findings feed new rules, while enforcement generates additional signals for future detection. - The open-source release is based on Discord’s production system rather than a reduced version; improvements from ROOST were later reintegrated into Discord. ## ROOST’s Collaborative Model - ROOST builds on earlier cross-industry efforts such as image hashing for child-safety work, the Tech Coalition’s Lantern program, GIFCT incident response, and shared ISO safety standards. - Unlike organizations that primarily steward open-source projects, ROOST also develops and maintains a suite of public-interest safety tools. - Its projects include Osprey and Coop, a comprehensive review tool. - Open-source tools can raise the minimum level of protection available to smaller platforms and reduce the spread of threats across services. - The model also enables companies to build managed services around free tools, similar to businesses built around Linux. ## Adoption and Industry Impact - Musubi announced a managed Coop offering, while Zentropi integrated its labeling engine with Coop. - Osprey v1 was introduced at FOSDEM, prompting collaboration among engineers from multiple organizations and protocols. - Platforms such as Bluesky are already using Osprey. - More than 360 million users across participating platforms are now covered by open-source safety tooling. - ROOST continues development through public contributor and adopter working-group meetings held every two weeks. ROOST’s approach suggests that open, production-grade safety infrastructure can help platforms respond faster to emerging threats while creating a shared foundation for industry-wide improvement.