/0

Ahoy, y'all!

I've been meaning to make a post like this for some time.

Ever since this post I've been thinking about the governance structure on dbzer0 more and more. I've had some good discussions about the current governance model in that post, and I've also read other's perspectives with interest. For those interested, here are the threads I'm referring to:

• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/24353142
• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/24418866

This week, I finally found some time to write about my thoughts in the hope that it could start a larger discussion about how we could improve the way decisions are made on this instance.

In the mentioned post, the general sentiment is in favor of defederating from (by far) the largest German Lemmy instance.

One comment stuck out to me: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/24355698

u/ggtdbz mentions how they are directly affected by zionism, but are against the decision. Importantly, they make an alternate proposal: a 3 or 5 strikes system, but keep feddit.org federated, so that the (heavily propagandized) German users are still exposed to anti-zionist thoughts, and will not be able to consider theirs the default position on the subject. Many people upvoted.

Nothing further happened. There was no response by the OP, no governance proposal, no extending the timeframe of the vote.

Now I understand that someone probably should've made a governance post about this proposal, however, to my knowledge, noone in the mentioned threads had the voting privileges to do that. This structure is mostly opaque to me (and most other users, I think), which is one of the issues I see with it.

This brings me to another thing I noticed in these proposal threads: many don't seem to know how the voting system works. It isn't explained on the post itself, and isn't very legible either when people vote. As I understand it from this post, there're different voting classes, depending on if/how much a user donates to the db0 admins. But do their votes get more/less weight? These also give users a different reply image from the bot as the vote is recorded, showing either the voting class or what they said in their registration message. It explains that users who actually have a vote are paying users, mods, and select users who were vouched for by a paying user, mod, or another vouched-for user. Looking through the previous votes I could find 8 users who have been vouched for (and participated in a vote) so far.

Now I don't think this process was deliberated on by anyone outside the admin team who created it. I remember a few posts about the software to set this up being in development, and a post to announce its release, but none discussing just the structure of it. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.

The proposal vote posts typically ask for a 2/3 majority from db0 users (outside sentiment is recorded, but doesn't count for anything). Here also, I don't recall any discussion about what percentage should be aimed at (although I think a weak consensus is a good idea, be that 2/3 or something else). Votes by regular members (not a mod/admin, paying user, or vouched-for) are used as a tie-breaker, although the exact mechanics seem to be more complicated.

There is de facto no discussion process that precedes or leads to proposals, and no method to amend existing proposals before or after a vote is called (see example above). There is a governance post type called "sense-check", which looks like it's intended for discussions prior to voting, but in practice it has been used exactly once for this purpose, on the only governance topic that wasn't opened by u/Flatworm7591.

This is why I would classify this voting process as majority voting, as opposed to consensus voting. A majority vote in my understanding would be a simple vote that asks a yes/no question and passes if a certain size majority says yes, regardless of any other factors (strength of agreement, strength of disagreement, amendments, counterproposals, etc.) and requires no prior discussion by those affected. I think this is a charitable interpretation though, considering the relatively small pool of users who have actual voting rights.

Now after laying out my understanding of the existing structure, I'd like to propose two approaches.

First approach, a consensus vote:

A consensus vote would be one that follows the model: Discussion -> idea-collecting -> proposal -> amendment/counterproposal -> vote -> implementation or similar, that also takes into account strength of (dis)agreements (for anything other than full consensus) and abstain/stand-aside votes.

To avoid the issue of the one sense-check post we've had, which is that it wasn't ever voted on, I think an important addition is that discussions must end in a proposal that is then voted on, even if the proposal is "change nothing".

For this consensus approach, a harm to the community would first need to be identified (there are of course other reasons to make decisions, but I'm going to focus on grievances for simplicity). Then, someone creates a discussion post on the governance community to discuss what this harm is and what is causing it. Once the harm is understood, solutions can be discussed. This could be done by first collecting ideas and then trying to merge them into a proposal or choose the most popular ideas out of the lot. Once a proposal was formulated, people can voice disagreements with it so that everyone can think about amendments that could resolve those disagreements. Once all or the most major disagreements have been resolved, the proposal can be put to a vote.

Next, I want to talk about voting classes. I understand the inherent issues that come with online spaces like these, that any meaningful power given to the users can theoretically be abused by bots/bad actors, but I think it's an issue that only 8 users were vouched for, and the rest paid for their right. Vouching should be far more prevalent IMHO, or this place will still be run by a very small minority.

This approach is not intended as "Do this thing now and do it exactly as I tell you to". I'm sharing my thoughts on this in the hopes to start a discussion about possible alternatives/reforms. This approach is largely influenced by my reading on consensus systems and experience using consensus methods in IRL organizing spaces. Books/articles I've read on this that I found useful are: "Consensus" by Peter Gelderloos, "Consensus Decision Making" by seedsforchange.uk, and the Apache voting process.

Second approach, maximal autonomy:

This is one I am leaning towards a lot. The question I asked myself was "How would anarchists solve the problem of who to defederate from the best?" In governance votes about defederation there seem to be three major tendencies:

Those who want to:

1. defederate from problematic groups
2. federate, to keep these problematic groups exposed to radical ideas.
3. use personal blocklists to "defederate" and only actually defederate from groups like, for example, exploding-heads.com, skinheads.io, etc.

I think 2 and 3 aren't mutually exclusive. However 1 is incompatible with 2 and 3.

My proposal for those who find themselves in group 2 or 3 is to find/create an instance that defederates no instances you wouldn't also add to your personal blocklist. Then, rely on that blocklist and your own judgement. Since personal blocking only affects yourself, it doesn't raise the issue of having to make collective decisions on these topics.

A few Lemmy instances that defederate sparingly do exist, and rely heavily on users who create local blocklists as they feel the need to.

Perhaps someone could even create one that joins the FHF federation we got going on here.

Perhaps we could create shared blocklists that we curate, FOSS-style.

But the basic idea is to use blocklists to cut out the middle-person, the instance admins.

Naturally, this would still depend on moderation being done by admins, but I think having the least responsibility (and reliance) on admins as possible is the way to go, even if it cannot be fully removed.

This would also leave those in group 1 to make decisions with people who already have similar views, making decisions easier, and hopefully, strenghthening their consensus.

Finally

I hope I made some people think, and I hope we can have a healthy discussion about this in the comments, if people are interested.

Sorry for the long (and rambly) post, this has been on my mind for a few months now and it all had to come out at once :3

EDIT: To clear up some confusion I seem to have caused: The two "approaches" are not supposed to be mutually exclusive. I think we can and should consider both at once.

I also wrote a lot about instance defederations in this post, but I wanted to focus on how we make decisions broadly, not how we can handle (de)federation only.