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!
Well if someone cannot donate and cannot be seen contributing in any way, there’s very few ways to validate they’re a contributing member in the comm. Nevertheless. I have some other plans to allow people to nominate others and I want to onboard other ways to contribute except financially or socially.
That’s not currently the plan
IRL Identity Verification?
/s but like, it is one solution to stop sock-puppeting 👀
A lot of OpSec concerns, but if I could can arrange some sort of invite/vouching system, starting from known actors, it might work.
Change online “comm” to real life “community” and that becomes pretty problematic (we should not be relating levels of contribution to levels of rights and power/say).
I’m genuinely not trying to give you a hard time, and I understand that the two are not the same, and that running an online community has its unique challenges (anonymity, trolls, sock accounts, vote manipulation, and on and on), but I also think it’s really important to keep the framing of things in mind because it can be so fucking easy to default, even without wanting or meaning to, to the hierarchal constructs we are familiar and surrounded with.
I’ve never run any community or organisation online or irl, not even modded a community (was only appointed as one on my previous shitjustworks account as a backup), so I don’t claim to fully understand the challenges you face in implementing this, or have a magic solution to offer, but I think these points are fundamental and worth highlighting, so I am.
As for the tagging, just to clarify, because I think I misunderstood what a tag or flair is, are they the same? I assumed a flair was the emoji looking things, and those it makes sense that only you can add, in my mind a tag would be like some of the apps have, where you can tag a user as say “troll” rather than blocking, but is that not a thing that is happening here? (sorry, I’m only just waking and baking lol)
That’s the thing. You can’t just do that. There’s completely different dynamics at play. In meatspace you can see and validate the people you’re interacting with and can see they’re actuall unique and whether they contribute according to their ability, even if their ability is 0. In pseudonymous spaces like this, all this goes out of the window, so there’s very important steps to take to defend against trolls, sockpuppets and entryists.
I have actually run and moderated online comms for the best part of 16 years now and you can look back at my history to see how I’ve always made it a point to try to empower the unempowered. And now that I have full control of the infra, I want to take a stab at running a radical space with some of these ideas. I don’t expect I’m going to be perfect of course, but I’ll do my best.
That said, I absolutely recognise that not everyone has the funds or energy to be seen, which is why I want to provide other ways for recognition to happen. At the end of the day though, the voting threshold is really low. It’s only the init of new mandates that I think should have a higher requirement, but we’re not going to be super anal about it either.
So currently none of these are really integrated. But the idea is that only mods (and automated set by mods) tags users, and the user’s flair comes from these tags. Eventually I expect we’ll see some user-based tagging for personal use based on UIs or extentions in play, but that’s not something I can do. Self-flairing and even per-community flairing is something I also want to explore, but one thing at a time. :)
Yeah, like I said, I understand that they are not the same and that online communities bring up challenges that irl ones don’t, but I think we should still try to apply as many of the same principals to online communities as we would to irl ones as possible.
Cool, that’s basically the point I was aiming at with far too many words lol and just to reiterate, none of it was criticism or doubt of your admining, just wanting to highlight potential pitfalls.
Re flairs and tags, thanks for clarifying! It’s completely understandable that it isn’t a top priority, it isn’t one for me as a user either, though I do like the idea of a personal strike system for milder offenders before resorting to blocking lol but also to highlight friendlies, since I’m terrible with names 😂I’ll have to keep an eye out for interesting extensions…
ye a lot of that flair stuff should have honestly been built-in to lemmy, but I’m tired of waiting for it, so I’m rolling out my own :)
Good on you!