Experimental thought, but something I want to do in near future.
Basically admins and mods are selected sortitionally( randomly) from people who apply.
All admins and mods have fixed term limits.
Existence of Mod or Admin trials where a public chat(court) decides consequences for their actions, if they misbehave, could lead to
Ever since I learnt about the sortition system, I was incredibly curious how it would work irl, hence this idea.
Look, I am not going to claim this is a solution to anything, till ones actually up and running I think it’s hard to say which direction it will go. But still, I want your opinion on it.
On How to encourage people to mod a community?
By making mod duty easy for them, have small term limits, and in those term limits they only have to work for 4/3 days a week. Term could be just few weeks. Also get lot more mods and give them specific time slots beyond which they are vastly not needed unless an emergency.
It’s possible but will be very easy to manipulate by people making alts and sockpuppets. You’d need a way to verify individuals.
The Fediverse Anarchist Flotilla is already experimenting with this sort of radical democracy, through our regular governance threads and our radical admin recalls but we have to rely on paid supporters and individually vouched people to stave manipulation.
Anyway, people can already repurpose the threativore which is the bot that enables this voting to handle the extra stuff you suggest and give it a try.
Thanks! You’re an instance admin too I believe. Yes the idea is very close to anarchism, but Athens used sortition on top of it for day to day work.
Do you think the admin recalls and governance threads are working well, and haven’t been abused? Also I don’t find the fediverse instance you said, is it the same as dbzer0?
The FAF is a confederation of instances which ultimately act as one. /0 is one of them yes.
Until now our democracy seems to be working well.
Gives me confidence!
So, someone pointed out, there’s always someone who’s paying for the server costs and they might not like paying for instance someone else is running, what would be your take on that? Is there a way to tackle that issue?
That’s what the FAF is for. We have multiple instances with the same admins, rules, defederations etc to hedge against rogue sysadmins.
Thanks. I’ll think over everything you said. It does look like my instance could be eligible as a companion instance if executed well enough. Regarding alt accounts, I feel one must at least contribute somewhere on the instance to participate… Yeah it’s gonna be a tough problem to crack, and also the one other user pointed out, about funding. For an initial period I may run the pilot project, but when admins themselves aren’t stable, it’s going to create some problems.
Thanks for your feedback. I’ll think over it
Hah, lemmy.world would never choose to join the faf. In any case we only accept anarchist instances as we are supposed to share rules
You can just form a regular institutionalized user group / hobby association and run that this way if you want.
That’s the end point I see for the fediverse too, localized specialized interest groups that run themselves, know each other IRL and both finance the space because they see the value it brings them and democratically decide how to run it.
… but it doesn’t work perfectly with sign ups being unlimited, anonymized and open to the general internet.
cosocial.ca Mastodon instance worka like this
Also seems to be growing organically unlike the rest of mastodon . codeberg is also democratic and grows organically as indicated by donations.
There is some evidence this model could be beneficial. there is some research about the benefits of credit unions and housing cooperative which is also indirect evidence iirc.
The randomness of mod assignment could be a good thing. A mod with no subject matter expertise (real or imagined) would be less likely to be biased by their personal opinion.
Yup! Exactly the argument I have heard from people who back the system.
Yeah idea may sound stupid to some, but is it a question not worth pondering over?
I would not join. This type of thing is nice a laugh but I don’t have the time to do the work. So Im a leech on the hard work of others. I hope those others understand my life situation that has me leeching but I get others have even more challenging situations. Oh wait. Who apply. Not everyone? that is not athenian democracy is it?
Athen democracy did have a system where you had to consent to standing in the process. I mean isn’t that necessary? You only stand if you want to stand.
Also it’s not being a leech, one of the biggest success of their democracy was to ensure people working for government get a salary. Without a paid incentive I think plenty of people would just not participate in it at all.
My upper estimate is half of the dau might want to participate, realistically, I think number could be as low as 30 or 20%
Oh wow. I always though it was everyone. This is even a bit more concerning to me because its like the pool is people who want to do it but not to the extent to like make and nurture a community. I mean in some ways the fediverse is the ultimate democracy as anyone can make their own instance or community. As long as they are willing to put in the time they can do it.
I like it, at least as an experiment. Can’t hurt to try.
Make it! Fork Piefed/lemmy and get it setup. Why not, might be fun.
democracy for the slave owners?
The slave owners were against Athens democracy lol.
Quite a stupid idea honestly. You seem to not understand that someone needs to host the infrastructure that an instance runs on. So what you are saying is: give the admin rights to a server that someone pays money for, to some other person every few weeks. This just does not work.
Aren’t most instances on lemmy running on donations? While I absolutely understand your point, because of this I don’t think the hoster will have a veto unless they are the one funding it from their pockets
Someone has to make the actual contract with a hosting provider, unless there is a separate legal entity for this (e.g. Fediverse Foundation for feddit.org). Thus, someone needs to have skin in the game. I doubt someone would easily hand off the instance he/she is responsible for to a third party. At least I wouldn’t.
Fair point.
Don’t be a dick.
Still needs an instance owner who is legally responsible for all the content on the entire site - this way the police know who to come for if there is illegal content like CSAM. At that point, better make sure that the admins are trustworthy individuals who have been vetted more extensively than simply having applied.
But sounds a great way to engender a sense of ownership among mods (& perhaps those admins who were vetted).
Btw PieFed also has several features that implement democratization of moderation, lessening the work that a mod traditionally is forced to do on Lemmy since the end-users can do the thing on their own, aided with software. e.g. if someone wants to see less content about Musk or Trump, then keyword filters provide that option (All, Some, or None), rather than a moderator having to decide for all of the community members at once. Or if someone wants to avoid contentious content, they can hide or just collapse (requiring an extra click to read) comments below a certain (user-definable) score threshold. Or NSFW content can be blurred, rather than simply allowed vs. removed; also NSFW is distinguished from NSFL (gore). Also fwiw, moderator reports federate, and someone is actually notified if their content is removed or if they are banned, plus much more - PieFed already allows much more democratic processes than the more authoritarian-styled Lemmy provides for (I believe there is even a deeper description of administrative roles built right in). So you may want to read about that. See also this article.
However it is accomplished, it sounds like a grand experiment!
Csam is gonna be the ultimate hurdle I am gonna have to cross. Lot of traditional csam protections involve protection against already existing images on the internet, and even those software are becoming sparser these days.
The world is a less friendly place than it used to be… especially the interwebs.
