We have a “counsel of trusted users”, it’s the mod team who are committed to making our little democracy thrive. We don’t want to be in control, we want to facilitate the community in choosing its own direction.

The simplicity of our process works in our favor. If somebody spun up 1000 alts to mess with a vote, we would notice. All of the discussions and votes happen publicly, so anyone can audit the profiles involved if things seem weird. I’ll play whack-a-mole with bots every day if I need to, and that can also be audited on the publicly-visible modlog.

No system is perfect. This is the system we decided to try, despite the challenges that could arise from it.

The honest answer is that we’re still trying to get The Agora running, and a backlog developed in the process. We are working on it, it’s just going to take some time to sort through the old votes. We’ve been focused on cleaning up the process so we don’t have this problem moving forward.

And for our part, we only chose aye/nay because that’s what people were doing anyway. It seemed easier for everybody to keep it consistent.

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.

Aye

I believe defederation should be reserved for severe issues, and I absolutely believe this qualifies.

People keep giving Bethesda a pass for their nonsense, so they keep acting like clowns. Simple as.

Whatever you want to call the genre that Vampire Survivors popularized, Brotato is one of the best of them. The concept is inherently stupid, and they lean all the way into it. It’s also only $5.

This feels like a gross overreaction to the situation. Sure, I don’t love the fact that TD has a tiny presence here, but I fail to see how that should be cause to defed a large instance. Especially when that community just popped up recently, only came to anyone’s attention in the last day or so, and (to my knowledge) hasn’t caused any real trouble other than the Agora mod vote thread getting a bit spicy.

I’m sure it’s something we’ll need to address internally, but it’s just one item on that list. And for now, it seems like a low priority item.

If you want some really wild old storage tech, a normal VHS cassette could hold 3-5gb of data. But we didn’t have any use for that much storage at the time, and CDs were taking over by the time we did, so nobody bought the VHS storage hardware.

I love this for a baseline, leaning into the theme. The Theatre of Dionysus could work too, it kinda looks like an old forum.

I’ll probably try it eventually, but I don’t have high hopes since Edmund isn’t involved. SMBF was awful, and this looks like a similar mess.

Consider this another vote for Ubuntu or any of its variants. They’re beginner friendly, and established enough that you’ll find plenty of resources written specifically for them. Linux Mint is another one I’d recommend for beginners, it’s designed to “just work” out of the box and be an easy transition for Windows users.

Then it’s just down to using it some. First and foremost, leave Windows installed until you’re comfortable with whatever else you end up trying. Whether you partition, or make a bootable USB drive, or even just a VM, use some kind of temporary space for practice. The terminal is a lot less intimidating when you aren’t learning in your main environment, you can go break things and see what happens.

So far, we have a captcha on account creation now and it seems to be working (from what I’ve seen, anyway)

It’ll be a tough balancing act though. Relatively frictionless sign-up has been great for us, and anything that deals with bots will also affect that. Whatever else we may end up doing will need to be carefully considered.

I don’t even really think about it, I just comment if I have something to say. At worst, nobody reads it and I was shouting into the void for a minute.

But the Lemmy userbase isn’t massive yet, so those week+ old posts still see more engagement than you’d think.

I agree that some kind of ranked voting makes a lot of sense, and it’s something we should be looking at going forward. The mod vote is the perfect example (and some folks are doing it there), but we’d probably need the mods in place to handle the extra work.

We have a lot of work to do to get The Agora running well. This is a big one, but even simple things like the structure of how discussions and voting are handled need to be addressed.

The first time they referred to that world as the “Apex Universe”, I gave up all hope. Even if they do make a Titanfall 3, it won’t be what we want.

I can see both sides of this one, but I’d lean towards a lighter touch that focuses on intent. Someone can have a civil conversation while also swearing a lot (me irl), but it’s a completely different story if they’re trying to be inflammatory.

We probably won’t need to codify this in the rules. Someone who would receive the hypothetical ban for this would probably be breaking other rules anyway.

Seraph089

Of course I’ll vote for myself, but I’m happy to see that it’s a close race. Win or lose, I’ll be here trying my best to help our budding democracy flourish.

“Sledgehammer” is definitely the word I’d use, but it is an interesting thought. The Agora seems like it’ll be plenty for the foreseeable future, but there’s a hypothetical future where we outgrow it and need something that scales better.

At a quick glance, Decidim seems like it would be a decent solution if/when we need to upgrade. Free/libre with a focus on transparency is a great start, and it looks like the tools are pretty flexible.

But as a counterpoint, there’s a lot to be said for keeping governance here as long as it’s sustainable. Removing as much friction as possible from voting means more people will participate, and it doesn’t get much easier for voters than dropping an “aye” or “nay” comment on a ballot post.

Nay

While I do believe that defederation should be reserved for very serious cases, I don’t think it needs to go as far as “egregiously illegal” before we consider it.

And to Lemmygrad specifically, they’re the perfect example of why. They may not be the worst filth on the internet, but their reputation as a hive of tankies is casting a bad light on the entirety of Lemmy. Anybody connected to them is going to appear guilty by association, so defederation is a symbolic gesture as much as anything else.