So the exploding heads vote is well past a day old now. The vote is almost unanimous to defederate. It’s been obvious since a few hours after it went up what the community wants. It’s now taken well past two weeks to defederate from an obvious alt right troll and bot platform. Twelve days of silence from admins, then a day long debate thread, then an interminable vote. I requested word on when the vote could be called closed, but my question was acknowledged and ignored.
For my own self, I have at this point no faith in the administration of this instance anymore to be able to handle this. It’s very clear that wanting to not offend the alt-right is far, far more important than hearing the wishes of the users, and always has been. However, this is the agora, so I’m open to hear a counterpoint explaining why it’s actually very reasonable to spend weeks upon weeks in endless circling debate over whether or not it’s fine to joke about murdering marginalized people.
Edit: since my thread was locked and I can’t reply to accusations, I only joined beehaw because of this, about two days ago. I’m not “a beehaw user”, I’ve barely got my account there active. On this site I have a community and four hundred posts, but I’ll be closing that now.
I opened this thread after seeking comment and being ignored for a week. You can see it in my post history if you like. That’s enough of that for me.
What we are effectively doing here in the Agora is creating a form of government. One where every user can bring forth concerns and policy suggestions.
What we need to do this is procedures. No government in the world can run effectively without them. These would be things like deciding when a vote can take place, and deciding what the vote will be about. We will also need procedures on how we even get to the point of calling a vote.
None of this existed before the vote for the mods. I was a part of that original thread about defederating from EH, and it was half discussion, half vote, and half personal attacks. It was the ManBearPig of threads. That thread showed there was sufficient reason to call a true vote on the topic, and I’m glad the mods have done so. But that thread was out of control.
Now, you bring up a good point, that the vote thread seems to be overwhelmingly in favor. So, why don’t we propose a new policy? After 3 days, if the vote tallies show a supermajority of votes for aye or nay, and the vote has passed a certain number of votes cast, then the vote is called early.
We would want to make sure the supermajority is high enough to be clear, say 80% or 90%. And we must absolutely be sure that enough votes have been cast to represent the instance at large. Perhaps 40-50% of the total users? I’m no statistician, so these numbers will likely need to be adjusted.
Ultimately, we need to get to a point where enough policy and procedures have been decided where the mods and admins simply act out those policies and procedures without our needing to vote. If you stick around, you can help form those policies and ensure they are fair.
I would rather have us finish the the vote with the current process, before we make changes to it.
In my experience changing to much stuff at once, makes it difficult to find out what the one single change actually did.
Edit: spelling