Well, what would be your suggestion how to do it differently?

Just discussing it on a /c/meta thread doesn’t seem particularly useful and a vote is unlikely to yield meaningful results as few people seem to follow these threads.

It is also a questions of who this impacts the most and therefore should have the most say. As others have already alluded to in this thread, defederation is to a large part a tool to lessen the moderation workload. Furthermore, for a regular user it isn’t particularly hard to move instance if they don’t like moderation or defederation decisions, but moving communities is much more complicated.

Thus we can and probably should ask about defederation decisions in our moderators xmpp channel, but in this case it didn’t seem particularly controversial or high impact, so we didn’t do that.

deleted by creator

I came to SLRPNK.net from Beehaw.org, and while I think they do a lot of things right, I don’t think disabling downvotes is one of them.

While Beehaw members can’t downvote comments and posts on other platforms, visitors to Beehaw are able to downvote posts and comments on Beehaw and made by Beehaw members. While people on Beehaw can’t see these downvotes, they are visible to people off-Beehaw all the same.

I think downvotes are a useful way of getting a temperature reading on a comment. With it gone, it puts more stress on other methods of responding to bad comments, those being reporting comments to the moderators, and replying to the comment with a statement of disagreement or rebuttal. Both methods of reply are moderator-intensive; moderators need to reply to reports in a timely fashion, and contradictory replies often devolve into slap-fights, which also require moderator attention. A social media experience is judged by its signal to noise ratio, so removing or dampening uninformative or irrelevant dross helps the gems to stand out. Moderation is key, and moderators are the weak point in any social media design. Good ones are difficult to find, moderator skills are difficult to teach, and it is an easy task to burn out on.

Beehaw does a good job of seeking out moderators and limiting their community list to keep the moderation task more manageable. Even with those in place, the moderation task is too great to keep up with the demands of federating with a site like Lemmy.world, which lead to them defederating from the largest instance early in their existence. I haven’t kept up with their internal discussion in a while, but I get the sense that it is still a constant struggle.

Allowing members to downvote takes some of the work off of moderators. Judging quality in posts is a difficult task, and downvotes can provide useful information. Downvoting permits a more nuanced access to the wisdom of crowds. Sometimes the best response to a comment is to downvote and move on. Even in cases where an obvious rule-breaking content is eventually removed, like in the case of a racist comment, downvotes provide not only censure to the commentor, but solidarity with the people and groups targeted by their attack during the interim before moderator action.

Downvotes can be abused, and can communicate confusing information, like when a locally-upvoted post is torpedoed by downvotes primarily from a single foreign instance. I think giving moderators access to granular voting information in their communities was the right choice for Lemmy, and I think giving public access to statistical breakdowns of vote origin in comments and posts that reach a threshold of votes could be useful as well. I think even without technical improvements to mitigate these drawbacks, removing downvotes causes more problems than it solves.

I personally don’t have a strong opinion on that and would also need to check if that is an supported option in Piefed.

I participate in a lot of real world communities that are more horizontally organized and many do have a similar dynamic, but a key difference is that there are many levels of involvement and the more involved you become, the more influence you have.

Thing is, on the fediverse, one should not confuse involvement with the act of using it. Involvement means participating in communities moderation and running servers. If mods of a 100 users community come to slrpnk.net saying “you know, hexbears users have been really helpful in setting up the /c/solarpunkbigepicstoryline” they will have a saying. But a random user that may be a bot or the alt of a banned troll is certainly not going to get the same weight.

In theory we could vote, but there is a technical impossibility: organizing reliable anonymous votes online is simply not possible.

Mods have a bit of authority but rarely have any process for weighing the views of individual users

Indeed, they have more of an editor power: they make editorial decisions, subjectively listen to feedbacks and see how their communities evolve.

The difference between these is pretty large in terms of skill and time required, and it’s quite difficult to move between them.

In terms of skills, a mod is a regular user, that’s it. And time requirements can vary, but being part of a decently sized mod team is not a huge time commitment. Thing is, I feel it fair to say that people willing to put extra effort in community managements should not necessarily feel forced to take into account the decisions of everyone not willing to do it.

I mean, if I offer a free service because I believe in volunteer work and gift economy, and users vote to complain that it lacks a feature that would double my amount of work (like federation with known toxic communities), I think it is fair for me to deny it.

If I were offering a paid service and getting a wage from it, the dynamics would be different. We are too used to corporate systems where the crucial resource is money, and paid users satisfaction is the most important. In FOSS, the crucial ressource is devs/volunteers motivation, and anything that increases it is what you want to maximize.

(disclaimer: it is a hypothetical, I am not running any lemmy instance)

While lemmy admins do technically have ultimate authority over all the possible actions on the site, which can be used as an iron-grip to control an instance (as seen on a handful of some other instances), in practice, we admins at slrpnk self-limit our use of administration powers in almost all applicable cases, and 99% of the time, just use those powers for what are effectively janitorial duties that don’t require horizontal decision making.

In the day-to-day, the admin powers I use are to accept or reject user applications (rejecting spam/AI accounts, accepting applications that don’t give some sort of red flag), and ban spam or harmful off-instance users (and the rare slrpnk bot-user who manage to get through our curation). Neither of those tasks particularly lend themselves to collective decision making (though I faintly recall that Piefed allows for granular powers to be given to users, so there could potentially be more people who have the ability to accept or reject applications, but I might be misremembering that).

Anyone can create a community and become a moderator, and we’re perhaps unusual compared to other instances in that we allow our moderators to curate and moderate their communities as they see fit as long as it doesn’t do something egregious or against the site rules. That means mods do actually have meaningful power to shape or govern their communities in unique ways, which reduces the need for us admins to wield our power (we pretty much only step in if a moderator seems completely absent).

Besides writing the base rules of the instance, defederation powers are the only other thing mods or regular users don’t have access to. It’s so rarely used, that it has not been invoked in all the time I’ve been an admin on SLRPNK until now (coming up on two years), and is realistically the only power that could lend itself to a collective decision.

While it’s ultimately up for others to judge, I like to think we’re not terribly rash admins. If we were to put forward a proposal to defederate, we’re all pretty damn convinced that the instance in question poses a legitimate threat either to our users, the greater fediverse, or even society itself. Our task would then be to present the best possible evidence to our user base that defederation is a good idea so we can enact it. For MAGA.Place, that would be a fairly quick task, as they’re so blatant in their fascism. But for instances who are trying to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, like HC, it would not be trivial.

I really want to emphasize how time consuming of a task it would be to gather up the best examples of evidence (I could send you some in a DM, if you want), give a compelling case as to why it’s worth defederating over, potentially needing to explain the techniques used by them to seem more moderate than they really are, etc. And bear in mind this is to be done by volunteers who would most likely wish to be doing anything but scrolling through right-wing communities with nuggets of racism and bigotry in their free time to assemble a convincing, well reasoned and carefully considered case.

We’re lucky that there are (so far) very few instances that would even need this consideration. If there were more like HC, and we needed to put together a strong public case for each of them… Speaking for myself, it would suck all of the joy out of administering this community, as I really don’t want to be spending the time I put into here like that. I want to browse, comment, and have fun just like anyone else here, I just don’t mind doing the janitorial work in addition to that since I care about what this place provides to the people who visit it, the ideas it (hopefully) spreads to the wider world, and the desperate need for citizen controlled media.

If you want to have a greater involvement in this particular power we admins have, then I do honestly feel poVoq’s suggestion that gathering evidence as to why we should or should not re-federate with Maga.place or HC would be a fairly effective way to horizontally spread the burden of that required research & case-building into the community, instead of it being an additional unwanted task purely on the admin’s shoulders.

I don’t think you’re wrong to want to be able to independently verify our reasoning. I think that’s part of the reason it took us so long to ban HC, as they used a absurdity, jokes, and ‘randomness’ to foster a fascist base. I feel it’s not difficult to see if you know what to look for, but the strategy works because it’s not completely obvious. Those who call them out are more easily cast as humorless shrills, and people are more likely to view things from the stereotypical frame of power-tripping gatekeepers over-reacting to a joke, which is what it looks like on the surface to the uninitiated.

The conceit of HC is that it’s a ‘free speech’ zone, and that anyone can say anything, including things that happen to be fascist or support fascism. That’s not the case. Alice is the admin, this is her censoring criticism of Charlie Kirk’s deification documented in PTB. She enables her moderators to be just as censorious when it comes to pushing a right-agenda.

It’s worth reading up on the strategy of absurdity, particularly in regard to the banned Reddit community Frenworld. This is a community whose bread and butter was thinly veiled anti-semitic jokes and holocaust denial wrapped in cutesy images of frogs and clowns speaking in childish slang.

When contacted by this reporter recently and asked to comment on the content, shortly before the banning of their community, founders and moderators of /r/frenworld denied that the subreddit was linked to the right wing at all, let alone the far right, and said its content was harmless.

The impulse to give the benefit of doubt is a good one, to not ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity, but ultimately if nazis are at home on your platform, the end result is the same regardless of intention.

This is not the totality of the evidence, but I feel like it’s enough to demonstrate why we came to this conclusion.