I’d like to ask for @TheDude to make a server-wide announcement, visible to all members of this instance, that a binding vote about defederation is currently taking place.
Without knowing what the Lemmy UI allows, I was hoping for a text similar to the one informing new users that email verification is currently enabled. Here is what I would like the announcement to entail:
“A binding vote to defederate from another instance is currently taking place in /c/TheAgora. Should the vote be accepted, no users of sh.itjust.works will be able to access the defederated instance or interact with users of that defederated instance anywhere on Lemmy. Should the vote fail, the instance to be defederated remains federated, its content may still be shown on the home feed of sh.itjust.works and the users of that instance may still participate in discussion on this instance.”
I am of the very strong opinion, that no vote should be binding, unless it was announced early enough to all members of this instance! This vote will have instance-wide consequences, the fact that it is taking place needs to be broadcasted beyond this community!
Edit: fix typos (again)
Please god no, this agora shit has enough HOA vibes as it is without a bunch of busybodies making their crusade everybodies problem. I’m in favor of defederating and I’m still sick of seeing it on my feed.
The current policy is, a [Discussion] thread runs for a week, then a [Vote] thread runs for a week. How is that not enough time?
It’s a good amount of time in my view, but I also think that without some active means of “pushing” the vote to people who aren’t actively checking The Agora and who might not stumble across it in their subscriptions or local feed, we risk many people not having a chance to give their input.
Look if we are really going to do the direct democracy thing this problem will always exist. More engaged users will rule the forum, and less engaged users will feel marginalized and make excuses or demand concessions when votes don’t go their way. The only way around this is to enforce some kind of quorum threshold but that will almost certainly never work. Pinned announcements will just flood the forum unless you restrict the number of possible votes per week, which might be an interesting thing to try.
I personally kind of think it’s a bad idea (this brand of forum democracy), but I’m also curious to see the experiment play out.
I think having an announcement of the [Vote] results along with an invitation for people to check out the Agora would be useful. That way users will enter at the start of the cycle and can have time to read and participate with the discussion during the week.
I think that would be overkill. The current Vote thread has 327 upvotes and 419 comments, so it’s definitely being seen.
Also, having people come in and vote who didn’t take part in the discussion can be problematic as they’ll have a pretty shallow understanding of the topic and the arguments for and against.
This seems like a rash generalization. I’m sure there’s plenty of people who can understand the concept without reading everyone else’s opinion on it.
Besides, we shouldn’t try to limit voting on topics that affect everybody to just the people that spend their days arguing on here. This has a server wide impact and should be announced server wide.
