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.
I have also been wondering about this. But
admins and mods are selected sortitionally( randomly) from people who apply
That’s your point of starvation. The application
I think, instead, everyone on the instance should be a voting member. And the decisions should be taken based on some requirement on the votes
- person one flags a post -> that’s a vote
- maybe add a header that this post is under review? The voting process should probably be taking some time
- another person flags the same post -> that’s a vote
- someone else says it should not be flagged -> that’s a vote in opposite direction
- ??? <- can be changed by an instance wide vote too
- post/comment/user is either moderated or not, depending on votes and logic from the previous vote
In order to boost participation, randomly ask an active account to cast a vote on an ongoing discussion
I think there should be some way for “backend admin” to step in and ban something. But they should only do that for spam/csam/scam/etc. Nothing else, no matter how crazy or rude the take is
(btw, maybe the instance could also normalize asking someone to reword their take if it’s rude or can be interpreted badly out of context?)Application is important because applying means you’re motivated enough to take the role. Also limiting to people who have an account in the instance.
And yes, you bring a good point, random people can and should participate in it.
Csam was the true bane, and while cloudflare does have some protection, I am actively looking for better ways, even thinking of using qwen or deepseek v4 for specifically that. Except with open weight models it’s not just the model but who’s hosting it that’s also something one must take into consideration.
I believe admins would be good enough for spam, csam and scam stuff, let’s see though how it works out first
I’m curious, can’t wait to see how it goes!
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.
I think it’s a great idea. Why the Athens way with a lottery, though? Is that to address some specific thing, or just because you’d like to see how it goes? Because we kind of moved away from that in modern democracy, and now we do elections instead of a lottery. Likely because of …reasons.
Time slots etc also good ideas. We already have to factor that in because the userbase lives in vastly different timezones. And it’s great if spam etc gets removed in a timely matter and we don’t always have to wait until it’s 5pm in the States. Some good mod and admin teams already do it.
I’ll like to see how it goes. Sortition because they believed elections meant rich can back their favorable candidates and win. With sortition, since there’s no election most people who are contesting get more or less an equal footing. I am curious how did they manage to get an entire council with high participation
Hmmh. Good point. One remark I have: That’s kind of made for councils. So you get a representative sample of the population. And than you have like 501 individuals to discuss and make policy. I’m not entirely sure, but it feels to me there’s a lower boundary with group size. Once you randomly sample just 3 individuals, I’d be surprised it works as I expect you more to end up with randomness (in the decisions as well). Not with representation.
But also doesn’t feel like a new problem to me. For example the US Americans sample their juries in a court. On the other hand they don’t randomly sample the sheriff. Looks to me someone already put in some thought. And there’s extra things. Like extra steps when sampling the jurors. It’s not …here’s your jury, off you go… But there’s an entire complicated extra process to it. I suppose that might be related to something like the comparatively small group size of such a jury.
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.
Cryptographic IDs? Doesn’t work for everyone in the voting process but it could be a useful way to make sure mod x is whintheybsay they are
Democracy is when people pay to gain the right to vote
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
Yeah idea may sound stupid to some, but is it a question not worth pondering over?
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.
I think the scope of the idea is the service itself, not the hosting part. So the rotation would be for those who set sidebar, not those who deploy
Don’t be a dick.
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.
