“So you’re building a Fediverse server? Here’s a bunch of things to think about and to decide.” It’s a short 6 pages text, rather quick to read.
EDIT: by “building a Fediverse server” I don’t mean the software, I mean the instance itself. You know: hosting it, administrating it, moderating it, creating a community, etc. The main points that the text talks about are governance, vibes, documentation, mod team, decision making, community involvement, money, legal stuff, contact with other server operators.
By “building a Fediverse server” I meant exactly that, not software developers. (Thanks for pointing it out though - it means that my explanation was ambiguous. I’ll edit the above accordingly.)
Right, as a software developer myself, I equated “build” as “building” the software, not “building” the community or administration around an instance 😅
It’s kind of funny because when I used the word “building” the first thing that came to my mind was the server as a house - like, you’re building a digital home for a bunch of people. So the idea was in the opposite direction as yours. Just language things.
As a rule of thumb, we’ve observed that a team of 5 trained moderators appears to provide ample coverage and redundancy for servers of about 1,000 active users
That’s a fascinating bit of information. I would expect 5 moderators to provide coverage for more users. I am wondering how they came up with that statistic (will update the comment if I find an answer).
Remember that offliine/IRL community management experience can be just as important as online experience
Interesting idea, wondering what’s the IRL presence of the fediverse…
If you’re building toward participatory or democratic governance, consider establishing a proposal and voting system (some teams we spoke with use Loomio, but multiple options exist) for major policy decisions.
That’s soooo important, I love when communities create polls to decide on policy changes.
Avoid promoting brand-new members unless you already have a pre-existing relationship with them
I have followed some discussion on multi-level hierarchies on the fediverse, wondering if there are any instance implementing that…
Consider charging for accounts or offering paid memberships.
Hell no!
We hope there will be more resources available in the future, particularly tooling around legal compliance. This is one of the big infrastructural gaps we point out in our main report
That’s a big issue, I would be interested in hosting an instance available to other people, but I don’t want to end up in jail and I lack the resources to make sure that won’t happen…
That was an interesting read, it seems there is an in-depth analysis of the report here.
If other people want to pay and be paid, that's fine, but for a lot of people in the open source sphere it leaves a bit of a bad taste.
Basically it becomes something very different once it's a product you're selling. I'm honestly not sure it's a good advice - your users will rightfully expect a lot more from you if they pay for the product, and you'll probably not make enough money for it to really make sense. So it'll be more work, more obligations, and monetary incentives won't be strong enough for it to make sense.
Encouraging users to make donations to cover the cost of operation, on the other hand, makes all the sense in the world.
For context, I am the top donor at my instance, I recognize that there is a need for funds. BUT, I believe it’s important for the fediverse to be accessible to everyone regardless if they have the funds for that.
fediverse-governance.github.io
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