The topic came up in this discussion of what feature would you like lemmy to have. I talked with nutomic (one of the developers) a bit about this and he suggested opening a separate topic so we could discuss if and how to implement it best.
The topic came up in this discussion of what feature would you like lemmy to have. I talked with nutomic (one of the developers) a bit about this and he suggested opening a separate topic so we could discuss if and how to implement it best.
Lemmy has one model and it’s a good model - it works. There are other models which are interesting, but they are not Lemmy. My favourite is notabug.io - it’s total anarchy but it somehow works and attracts clever creative people.
People who are interested in democracy, one of the principles they use is “decisions should be made at the lowest possible level”. So instead of having big elections where you decide global rules, or appoint mods; you would have votes within a community about things affecting that community. Each community could have different rules. You could even have votes affecting a whole instance. It would be rare to have to make a rule for the whole federation of instances.
Small scale votes are less prone to manipulation, because they are not important enough. And they lead to better participation because each vote counts more. And even if one community/instance becomes corrupted, people can migrate, so it’s more robust that way.
Debian has a similar system, a system of “direct democracy” is interesting .
Lemmy model works but i think it could also use whatever competitive advantage it could get. “content is king” and i and most people just go where there is the most interesting content, Lemmy is still a “snack” to me because it does not have a lot of content and i get most of it from reddit (and other non social media sites of course, with a little facebook and twitter thrown in).