Home of the sh.itjust.works instance.
Well, look at the bright side: the evolution of descentralized federation now depends on the moderation topic. I wouldn't be surprised if someone takes federation to the next level and creates a moderation tool which would work out of the box for the fediverse, at the technology level (e.g. ActivityPub).
If and when this happens, federation has a bigger chance in replacing current centralized social networks.
I've been kicking around an idea in my head of making a Lemmy fork that has Tildes' ideas about modding baked in. (I would fork Kbin but I don't know PHP.)
In my experience, it's always been the best approach to select new moderators from the people known as active, high-quality members of the community. My goal with the trust system on Tildes is to turn this process of discovering the best members and granting them more influence into a natural, automatic one.
...
Trusting someone is a gradual process that comes from seeing how they behave over time. This can be reflected in the site's mechanics—for example, if a user consistently reports posts correctly for breaking the rules, eventually it should be safe to just trust that user's reports without preemptive review. Other users that aren't as consistent can be given less weight—perhaps it takes three reports from lower-trust users to trigger an action, but only one report from a very high-trust user.
This approach can be applied to other, individual mechanics as well. For example, a user could gain (or lose) access to particular abilities depending on whether they use them responsibly. If done carefully, this could even apply to voting—just as you'd value the recommendation of a trusted friend more than one from a random stranger, we should be able to give more weight to the votes of users that consistently vote for high-quality posts.
...
Another important factor will be having trust decay if the user stops participating in a community for a long period of time. Communities are always evolving, and if a user has been absent for months or years, it's very likely that they no longer have a solid understanding of the community's current norms. Perhaps users that previously had a high level of trust should be able to build it back up more quickly, but they shouldn't indefinitely retain it when they stop being involved.
Between these two factors, we should be able to ensure that communities end up being managed by members that actively contribute to them, not just people that want to be a moderator for its own sake.
Combine that with things like AutoModerator (the person behind Tildes is the one who built AutoMod on Reddit) and it seems like a reasonable way for a platform to promote good stuff and cut down on bad.
You'll have to deal with per-community "power users" with a lot of power, but the alternative is unelected mods who can be just as bad.
I don't know if I'm ever going to get around to making that fork. But I think taking Tildes' approach to mods is novel and fresh, and I quite like it.
I actually am a little curious what TheDude’s opinion is on open vs closed registration policy. If having a closed registration policy is all that is needed for beehaw to refederate then perhaps that is an option, otherwise let us just hope the necessary mod tools (or more than 4 beehaw mods) happen to allow for refederation. It’s a shame since I feel like this is a really important / formative time and I do not think larger instances defederating is productive.
But that’s just my uneducated 2 cents :p
Wait, I'm confused, it's beehaw that defederated with us?
this is also not a permanent judgement. in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we'll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.
This is c/support@beehaw.org federated onto Kbin. Beehaw is defedding from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
Edit: So that is how you make a working link across the fediverse.
Disappointing but I understand it in the sense that their goal has always been "safe, controlled community" way before they accidentally became one of the largest instances.
I had an account there first, and then made one on kbin since the federation issues with kbin could have potentially lasted awhile, but after this I think it's best to leave beehaw behind if this if going to be any indication of how they're handling their inability to properly moderate at scale. Big red flag IMO.
I was never able to sign up or log into Beehaw. It's very limited in terms of who it allows to sign up, and the waitlist is probably incredibly long.
This cutoff means that I'll have to live without being able to participate in a lot of discussions, which defeats the purpose of joining the fediverse entirely.
It's just as useful to me as using Reddit right now, even less so with how much less popular Lemmy instances are currently.
Seems well justified based on the announcement post