Hey peeps, I got a few things to talk about.

First of all I am happy to announce that the Divisions by zero will be joining the newly minted Haidra non-profit org. The plan is to use Haidra as the fiscal host for your donations to the instance and have things a bit more organized in the backend. Haidra is our own non-profit, so it should carry our values and avoid conflict with people who don’t understand our ethos.

With the non-profit in place, I wanted to put into action a plan I had for a long time. To implement some sort of radical instance democracy. I don’t believe in Benevolent Dictators for Life and thus I always look for ways to receive a mandate for my actions all stakeholders, rather then deciding top-down. Unfortunately the nature of hosting a service like this does not allow anarchist democracy to be practised, as at the end of the day, there’s a sysadmin with the passwords holding all the power, but given that for this specific instance, that sysadmin is myself, I want to try and experiment with this.

As part of Haidra, the project itself (i.e. the divisions by zero) maintains full autonomy, so its own decision-making remains in its own community. However as a member project, it also effectively gets a vote in the internal running of Haidra. For me use your mandate, I need to figure out a way to receive it. To this end, I want to try and implement some sort of system to allow such democratic decision making.

Unfortunately we cannot reasonably allow every registered member to vote on instance policies, as it’s trivial for any bigot to join and make sockpuppets and throwaway accounts to affect our policies.

So I want the voting process to be somehow run by the instance stakeholders, so I came up with the concept that the only people who should be able to take decisions on the instance, are those who have monetary contributed to the hosting and personnel costs, or who are putting significant effort into nurturing communities here and potentially in the larger fediverse. The idea is that if you’ve put into action your support of this instance, you should deserve some say on how it’s run. That said, while I’m still doing most of the work behind the scenes, I still need to feel good running this instance, so I will need to come up with ways to reject people from the voting process if they don’t match our ethos. I won’t in good faith allow bigots to vote, just because they have money.

Now the trick is how to do this in a way that is manageable. While I have access to the accounts subscribed on Ko-Fi and Liberapay, connecting them to accounts in here is a massive PITA. Likewise it’s not easy to easily remember who is contributing in direct action to this instance.

So once more the mad science lab that is my brain, has come up with some new ideas. First I have updated the threativore bot so that it now also provides a REST API on top of its bot functionalities. The REST API can now be used to retrieve extra user info that is maintained by the instance admins about users on our instance, that is not always relevant to the software (and as such is unlikely to be added to the API by the devs).

One big aspect of this update is that I can maintain user tags inside threativore. These tags are free-form and will allow us to mark users as contributors through ko-fi or other means. In fact, I even setup a complete backend DB connection to threativore and a webhook for ko-fi, so that as soon as you donate to the instance, you will be marked on threativore as a contributor, so long as you used the same email address on both (if you didn’t, and you want to be recognized, please send me the email you used on ko-fi in a PM and we can override)

However, because I can’t just do things only a little bit, I decided to extend the tags functionality to also have a key for “flair”. Each tag assigned to a user has an optional flair key, which can be an emoji, or a link to an image. Currently those flairs don’t serve any purpose, but I have already pinged some of the popular third party UIs (which we’re currently hosting and I wholeheartedly suggest you use), to assist us in making those flairs visible.

In fact, those flairs are not even restricted only to our own instance, we can potentially flair any user from any instance and I have a lot of plans to make expand this functionality. The only limitation is finding UI developers to handle that end.

In fact, I have already created and onboarded some starting flairs for our instance. Some of them will be automatically assigned by the ko-fi webhook, and some others will be automatically assigned by the way you answered your registration application. Here they are:

Ko-Fi

These 4 are coming from Ko-Fi subscribers. The idea is to use them to flair people so I can quickly see whose votes would count in the democratic process. Initial plan is that every subscriber should be allowed to vote, but only subscribers who fund a lot can open new votes for mandates.

• : Drinking Mate is the tag for people who have donated in Ko-Fi, once off. The tag will expire after 2 months.
• : Threadiverse Enjoyer: The people at the lowest end of the ko-fi support.
• : Deck Hand: The people who support significantly through the year (as it stands, each of them effectively covers half a month of hosting per year)
• : Salty Dog: The people who massively support each month (each of them effectively covers ~1/5th the monthly cost)

Liberapay

• : Threadiverse Enjoyer: Same as Ko-FI
• Powder Monkey: The people who support significantly through the year
• : Buccaneer: The people who massively support each month

Affiliations

The below flairs are going to be assigned depending on how you answered the registration application. If you mentioned more than affiliation, you will be assigned all of them matching.

• : The bread book: Will be assigned if you mentioned an anarchist.
• : Jolly Roger: Will be assigned if you mentioned a pirate
• : Wildebeest: Will be assigned if you mentioned a FOSS advocate/software.

Finally we have the MVP which I plan to assign to signicant contributors to the instance in some way. Perhaps lifetime funding and/or fediverse presence? Perhaps we should vote on it :D

All of this is only the beginning of what I want to do here, but this beginning will be short-lived if we can’t get UI developers on board. So if you’re maintaining one of the 3rd party UIs in the sidebar, please contact me. Likewise, if you’re excited by any of this and you can help hack the exising lemmy UIs (including the default one) for our instance purposes, please speak up and that would be a good ground for an MVP flair! :)

In the meantime I will use threativore to start doing some scripting to allow only-staholder voting, and we’ll try it out soon.

If you have ideas and improvements about all this please post. If you have ideas for more flairs and way reasons to get them, let me know. If you have thoughts about how this democratic experiment should be structured, now is a good time to write them!