Quick-Start Guide to Fediverse Governance Decisions

Carighan , 4 hours ago

That’s not a quick-start guide, that’s a novel.

alsaaas , 4 hours ago

If you call 6 pages a novel, that’s on you…

not even full pamphlet lenght

souperk , 2 hours ago

Can someone ELI5 so I can get enough dopamine to go read the whole thing?

lvxferre , 1 hour ago (edited 1 hour ago)

“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.

SorteKanin , 1 hour ago

It’s more like for instance admins rather than the developers of the server software itself. At least that’s how I understand it.

lvxferre , 1 hour ago

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.)

SorteKanin , 1 hour ago

Right, as a software developer myself, I equated “build” as “building” the software, not “building” the community or administration around an instance 😅

lvxferre , 1 hour ago

Ah, that explains it.

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.

SorteKanin , 1 hour ago

I think also the use of the word “server” instead of “instance”, but it’s quite a small semantic nitpick.

souperk , 57 minutes ago

Dopamine received, initiating hyperfocus protocol!

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.

rglullis , 22 minutes ago

What is the problem with paid accounts?