So the exploding heads vote is well past a day old now. The vote is almost unanimous to defederate. It’s been obvious since a few hours after it went up what the community wants. It’s now taken well past two weeks to defederate from an obvious alt right troll and bot platform. Twelve days of silence from admins, then a day long debate thread, then an interminable vote. I requested word on when the vote could be called closed, but my question was acknowledged and ignored.
For my own self, I have at this point no faith in the administration of this instance anymore to be able to handle this. It’s very clear that wanting to not offend the alt-right is far, far more important than hearing the wishes of the users, and always has been. However, this is the agora, so I’m open to hear a counterpoint explaining why it’s actually very reasonable to spend weeks upon weeks in endless circling debate over whether or not it’s fine to joke about murdering marginalized people.
Edit: since my thread was locked and I can’t reply to accusations, I only joined beehaw because of this, about two days ago. I’m not “a beehaw user”, I’ve barely got my account there active. On this site I have a community and four hundred posts, but I’ll be closing that now.
I opened this thread after seeking comment and being ignored for a week. You can see it in my post history if you like. That’s enough of that for me.
Hey man, I think you’re being a bit harsh. Let’s not sharpen our pitchforks just yet. These are volunteers who have likely never had to admin a larger community like this. I can see why you’re frustrated, and agree with you for the most part, but the way you frame this assumes malice where it’s not neccessarally true.
They have given a timeframe for voting, a week. Though in this instance it’s unlikely needed this is likely the reason action hasn’t been taken on the new vote. The old one? They haven’t taken action on most of that era of voting either. It was too much, so they’ve instituted this.
I sincerly doubt this is due to ‘not wanting to offend the alt right’.
According to the pinned post, votes go up on Friday and stay up until the following Friday. The same post also indicates these procedures are by no means final.
I agree that it’s clear what the community wants, just call it at this point. A week long vote might be suited to policy changes, but I’m starting to get the feeling that defederation of specific instances should be done quickly - informed by existing policy rather than popular vote. None of us really want to fuck around with bigots and trolls any longer than we have to.
In this case, I would personally advocate for something like this line of reasoning: “the users on this instance have a clear pattern of violating our instance’s first two rules and the administration isn’t acting to remedy it, therefore we defederate effective immediately”.
I do want to echo what @sorrybookbroke is saying, please give the admin team some credit, they are putting in a serious amount of manual mod work. It’s apparent to all of us that the policies still have a ways to go, but it takes time to build a community.
I think a week is good. Some use social networks at work, some on weekends, some occasionally. Some might be away for a few days. It’s not like everyone is on Lemmy every day.
Even though in the case of defederating fash / bots (bots being more of an emergency), a temporary measure could be taken based on the initial results.
What we are effectively doing here in the Agora is creating a form of government. One where every user can bring forth concerns and policy suggestions.
What we need to do this is procedures. No government in the world can run effectively without them. These would be things like deciding when a vote can take place, and deciding what the vote will be about. We will also need procedures on how we even get to the point of calling a vote.
None of this existed before the vote for the mods. I was a part of that original thread about defederating from EH, and it was half discussion, half vote, and half personal attacks. It was the ManBearPig of threads. That thread showed there was sufficient reason to call a true vote on the topic, and I’m glad the mods have done so. But that thread was out of control.
Now, you bring up a good point, that the vote thread seems to be overwhelmingly in favor. So, why don’t we propose a new policy? After 3 days, if the vote tallies show a supermajority of votes for aye or nay, and the vote has passed a certain number of votes cast, then the vote is called early.
We would want to make sure the supermajority is high enough to be clear, say 80% or 90%. And we must absolutely be sure that enough votes have been cast to represent the instance at large. Perhaps 40-50% of the total users? I’m no statistician, so these numbers will likely need to be adjusted.
Ultimately, we need to get to a point where enough policy and procedures have been decided where the mods and admins simply act out those policies and procedures without our needing to vote. If you stick around, you can help form those policies and ensure they are fair.
There were quite a few people who were expressing the opinion in the discussion thread and in other discussions here that they didn’t want to be ruled by “the tyranny of the active minority”.
I’ve not seen a democratically run instance like this before. Things are going to be a bit clunky and slow (as they are in any democracy). Let’s give the process a chance, this is all very new and experimental.
