Now that we have a mod team in place for The Agora, this is our next priority. We’re working on some preliminary guidelines based on previous discussions/votes that we’ll be discussing soon.

For now, just know that we share your concerns. We want everyone to feel represented here, not just a vocal minority.

At any point in time, there will be just one voting thread open on the Agora where people get to decide on issues that will affect how the instance is run in the future, pinned at the very top.

already done, “Changes to the Agora” post. Well pinning isn’t but obviously these threads will get upvoted enough to get to the top of practically any sorting. I do agree that it would be better to pin these.

I suspect that many more people on this instance feel the same way, not wanting to participate daily in internal politics that is, or aren’t even aware of the voting power the Agora holds

I argue that it is very simple, if one is aware that the Agora exists. Read the rules, vote in the one-week period. Feel free to participate in discussions.

I fear a ‘tyranny of the active few’, to put it in hyperbolic terms, that has the potential to drive away the majority of people.

Again, it is easy in my eyes.

Yet (semi) daily, the Agora seems to vote on issues that will affect me directly […]

This seems to be the problem here. According to the changes post, there is one [Vote] post, Friday-Friday.

I agree with the direction you’re suggesting. I think it may also be helpful to identify a few key issues that would require more than a simple majority vote to overturn.

In particular, we’ve already gotten multiple posts on defederating from various instances, and on clearing our defederation list. My suggestion is that something like once per month we hold a vote on defederation issues. A 2/3 majority vote to defederate/refederate must be achieved to pass.

These are good ideas and I share the concern. The dynamic is similar to city government, where an active minority of usually wealthy retired homeowners has outsized power because they have more leisure time. It’s undemocratic.

Another idea to ensure that decisions are not made by an unrepresentative minority is a minimal voting threshold. For example: Only threads with a minimum of x votes will be considered. (Where x might be a percentage of total users of the instance, so that it changes over time.) It would be silly to make important decisions based on a thread with just a handful of votes.

Thanks for posting this. You’ve summed my concerns well. I’ve been active on agora (though mostly I have been posting in the logo topic) - but I’ve been doing it out a sense of needing the balance out the more motivated ‘HOA’ type users, who seems to be brigading around to an extent.

I really like all of your ideas but especially the voting needs to be done by comment upvotes or polls, instead of a chain of ‘ayes’ and ‘nays’ - and the votes needs to have clear rules about how long they run.

I get the sense that these things may be set after agora mods are in place. Thats just my assumption.

I also really think the agora community SHOULD NOT be able to target specific communities for defederation. Instead we should articulate rules that federated communties must adhere to, and auto defederate from communinities that are shown to break them. People aren’t going to want to wait a month to be defederated from a gore instance or something like that.

The process is way too witch hunty as it is. It got very toxic very fast.

Commented on something like this the other day. Official votes should be limited to its own community with only active votes. The slate of votes would run at standard times (i.e. Sunday to Sunday). The agora could be used for discussion and meeting a threshold for a topic to clear to be put on the voting slate.

I agree. I don’t want a small number of highly motivated individuals with grudges, vendettas, and ideological priors having that much power. Ban TheDonald type stuff, bots, etc. but otherwise be very careful

I don’t like the whole thing at all. Thankfully I have accounts on other instances which whom I can browse the Fediverse. I do need this one here to moderate my community, though, since there seems to be a bug with moderating one on a remote server.

This whole mob-rules thing smells like High School drama.

Call me a pessimist, but I see this only going the way of a hive mind against whatever becomes unpopular at the moment. The good news is I already have another account elsewhere.

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