Glad to see you’ve already be thinking about it, and those are all excellent points. It is hard to make a system like that in a way that precludes it from being gamed, and voting would require tracking user reputation in some way as well. I imagine it’s something that would need to be tried and refined over time if you do decide to give it a shot. No matter how good the system is, people will continue to look for different ways to game it. So, it’s always going to be an arms race between loopholes being discovered and addressed.

I also very much agree with the emphasis on active users over subscriber counts. Ultimately, it’s the people who actually participate that make the community what it is. Although, jumping communities/servers might be a bit trickier once the scale grows. And this would be an important aspect from activism perspective. If there were a million active users in a community, and it was being used for real world agitation and organizing, then a rogue mod could potentially do a lot of damage.

Thinking a bit more about it, I wonder if a simpler solution than voting could be to allow making communities with restricted mod powers instead. For example, could make it so that community can’t be deleted, mods can’t take it private, etc. And as you note, if the admins are actively participating then they can be used as arbiters for issues like rogue mods. You’re right that this is a big difference from Reddit, and if server admins go rogue then there’s really nothing you can do about that with software anyways. So some trust is ultimately necessary.

I just wanted to float the idea, and I’m also not sure how workable it would be in practice. It’s obviously a bunch of effort to implement and test a feature like this, so it’s worth thinking about the merits before investing the time into implementing it.

The main problem is that Lemmy is still using a client-server model, so the person or organization who controls the server, can always censor or block local users freely. Federation helps with this mainly by making it much easier to move to another instance. Things like voting for moderators cant solve that, unless it is in a p2p model (which would be a lot more complex).

Very true. GrapheneOS community sockpuppeting, as I proved, or the recent anti Semite /pol/ brigading observed here, are fantastic examples of how anonymity abusers can work around voting systems and comment/post/user representation numbers.

I call these people “anonymity abusers” because that is what they do, and they do it to me. I experience it and I document it. I have to screenshot everything, and be swift and vigilant. It takes effort. But I do it because I do not want others to face this stuff.

And that also means democracy has to unironically stem from morally correct benevolent authoritarianism, because anonymity presents us with this paradoxical situation. There just does not exist any other way for humans at the moment. Maybe someday with AI and automated systems we could do better, but those are far away in time, and requires AI to also not be morally corrupt or practically faulty.

There are robust ways to do that. I’ve had discussions about it on Lemmy, so I could find the technical term again if necessary. The idea is to have everyone vote at the same time, and pass a turing test (for example a captcha) during a particular timeframe.

But I had thought of a different possible solution for lemmy. There could be a top-level namespace shared by all instances. So there is only one global “antiwork” community. There can in fact be many with the same name but when you search for c/antiwork you will be redirected to whichever one has the most active users / month. Other communities with the same name can still be found through their URLs. But if there is a mass exodus from the global community to a different one, the new one will automatically take its place in the global namespace.

For the other problem of mods deleting things, tags will help. So you could have a setup where nothing can ever be deleted, only tagged as “deleted”. Users have to turn on “deleted” in their filter and all the posts which were purged will become visible, along with all the deleted spam posts.

It seems like it’d require such a level of research that is almost impossible to do it.

Excellent points! There are inherent limits to what can be achieved using online spaces, and any serious movement should organize offline first and foremost. That said, I do think that online spaces play an important role, particularly when it comes to agitation. Western left is just starting to discover ideas like class consciousness, and a lot of people get exposure to these ideas on internet forums such as Reddit and Lemmy. Then they talk to their families, friends, coworkers, and other people they interact with in physical spaces. We need a ways to promote communism with people who have no ideological training and who are looking to make sense of the changing world. This is why I think we need good forums for doing agitation and education. As you note, having an existing IRL organization run something like a Lemmy instance might be a good way to achieve that.

If the party wants a web site with user comments, it can make one and appoint moderators who can be recalled by party members.

I am seriously thinking about this now that lemmy supports private instances with closed registrations… if I host an instance for a party I can also control every setting, and encrypt everything… the only way feds could ever see anything is if they get access to a user account. But I’m not sure if the link aggregator format would work well for party organising.

I agree that a whole new project that’s explicitly designed for organization would likely achieve the best results. I do think it makes sense to keep UX largely the same since it’s been shown to scale well, but the underlying mechanics would need to be rethought.

One point that’s been brought up here a few times is that server admins ultimately have full control of the server, and can even just shut it down. So, a more decentralized architecture would be needed from ground up to prevent this.

The main problem that I think needs to be solved is how to prevent bad actors from ruining a community. This includes external problems like brigading, as well as internal ones such as rogue mods or admins. It has to be assumed that good actors can flip, and there needs to be some process for removing them from power at that point.

That’s been my thinking as well, there isn’t a clear and simple solution to the problem. So, it’s interesting to do some brainstorming to see what can be done to address these kinds of things.

I didn’t have a reason to hate u/spez (cause I never paid much attention to the founders and employees), but now I do.

Are you talking about forking the entire project or federating? If federating, I agree. If forking, I think that’s not practical for most people. I think some mastodon drama had people saying stuff like “don’t like it, then go fork it!” which I think effectively was a way of brushing off criticism without meaningfully engaging.

Definitely hard to implement, but an idea I’ve never heard of before. Thanks for bringing this up. Cool to think about. Does any other site actually use this moderation technique?

I like this! I think, like you say, it’s not easy to do, and I think federating/de-federating or subscribing/unsubscribing is an imperfect proxy to your suggestion. What does suck, though is when a community becomes “too big” and, due to a large audience base the cost of mass migration is substantial.

I think of the drift of a place like /r/IAMA - which used to have the slogan " I Am A, where the mundane becomes fascinating and the outrageous suddenly seems normal." It was more about the anything part than anything else.

But it has sense become a promotion platform for celebrities, having almost entirely left behind its original identity.

Or the drift into racist co-opting of half of the joke subreddits. But in those cases they transform and it’s hard to solve by snipping out the mods.

I thought I was gonna end with a clear takeaway here, but I guess not really. Maybe it’s this: insofar as you can stop it by sniping out bad actor mods, there’s a positive there, especially if it can be done without open voting which can be dominated by angry mobs.

i think that kind of forum would be onto something interesting

anonymous boards can be a pleasing experience. I’ve been active on 4chan for a few years (and on 8chan for a few months), the comfort of anonymity and the impossibility to develop bias toward specific online identities help people to express their mind openly and without fear of being judged or having your shit takes stickied on your front head for the rest of you online persona’s life - which is something I’ve always liked about these places. Forming a bond with the board’s hivemind and having a place to vent without the fear of being judged is truly a weird and unique experience. If it wasn’t for all the trash it attracts. These spaces were totally ruined by the nazis and hyper-libertarian shitting all over the place. I stopped hanging on there for the vitriolic, racist, bigoted posts popping out every two threads, who luckily didn’t radicalize me, they rather had the opposite effect. Every now an then I still have a look at what some anonymous Telegram bots are up to, they’re the only place that offer an image board-like experience and that are moderated. I too wonder what 4chan would be like without all the alt-right and hyper-libertarian trash

I was a moderator of an image board once and basically they tell you that you should be lurking and if you see anything that breaks the ToC you should delete it and ban that IP if it’s too horrible. Mind you this image board wasn’t so big (it’s not super small, though) so maybe moderation in some bigger one is a bit more serious.

Not the brightest moment in my life, hehe. sighs in depression

I am not fully sure, but from my analysis of nanochan (asuka), 4Chan (hiro, moot), 8Chan (yes not 8kun, I used 8Chan way before shooter incident), 2ch.hk, lainchan and some other chans, many have their invite only admin groups on Discord or Mumble or such services.

As for the moderation, it is as loose as not allowing CP or gore. Rest everything gets allowed usually, making for a nearly free speech zone. The whole concept of anonymous imageboards stands on the shoulders of free speech. And no matter if anyone admits it or not, we are all very chaotic in nature and like the content diversity of chans from an era humanity might never see again. We just tend to have a good moral compass that is not rusty or broken, and we understand the consequences of the immorality that goes on there, and we do not want that tumour to spread.

These kinds of interviews can be done well, but people doing the interviews need to have some media training and to have good answers at hand for the sorts of questions that would be asked. This is a good example of a Fox interview done right. So, I’d say the main takeaway here is that these things shouldn’t be done on a whim, and require lots of practice and preparation to do well. And it definitely has to be done by someone who’s comfortable on camera. A written interview is much easier to do, so that should always be the preferred option.

The fundamental idea behind work is that certain things need to be done in order for people to live whether people like doing these things or not. We need to produce food, build housing, provide sanitation, healthcare, and all the other things that make a society function. The necessity to do these things isn’t going to go away, and therefore the idea of work will not go away either.