I have decided that new moderator (including a new head moderator) are needed for the future of this community. I will step back into the position of moderator that I had previously held. If enough people demand I will consider stepping down completely. I apologize for any harm that I have caused to this community.
My point was that a system not (as) dependent on hierarchy might’ve stood up better. It’s not “those icky tankies are so bad even software they wrote magically works against us” but “this software is built in a way that makes our Communities (the subreddit-like construct specific to Lemmy) depend entirely on like three people… when we’re lucky.” When one of the three gets bullied out of the community he made and the other two don’t have the community’s interests at heart, the community’s screwed unless some specific person steps up to be the authority for a new one.
…On the other paw, perhaps our failure to just go make a new, collaborative Liberty Hub reflects poorly on us. I don’t mind blaming the instance a bit, though. Dunno what I’d consider a safer, more sensible one at this point.
Ahh I see what you mean.
Honestly it comes down more to the fact that nobody else stepped up to mod before the drama.
A holdover from reddit culture is having a tight knit group of mods for each community, when it could very well be more open than that.
For example the /c/Trans comm here and /c/traa on hexbear.
/c/Trans here did open recruitment a while ago and pretty much anybody that was interested got added to the team and subsequently the matrix chat.
Hexbears /c/traa will add pretty much anyone that’s been active in the community and is trans in order to have moderation available around the clock. As a result any bad apples are culled asap, and the community is much better for it.
I do agree that there could be something that isn’t so top heavy though, but I’m not personally sure what such a system would look like.
Followup to my other comment, I remembered reading a comment chain earlier about this very issue
I have to disagree with that bottom critter: every decision gets made by one person. Maybe a ban can be reversed… later, by someone else. Maybe a post can be undeleted… later, by someone else. If the whole community votes for option B and the one mod chooses option A, option A is chosen. Any system built atop the in-code hierarchy is just a coat of paint, some lines on the road. The lines on the road don’t stop cars from hitting each other, if you get my meaning.
Now, obviously I’d prefer a “lines on the road” system where someone’s formally in charge but expected to do as the community wills, but I find myself excited about systems that build on other forms. Maybe collective ownership through voting, maybe a web of trust that can dynamically exclude people found to be harmful and maybe display a rating for whether someone’s a bullshitter or a pillar of the community. Kinda hard to keep that from just being karma but maybe it can be done! Maybe something super cool that I haven’t even seen yet. … Okay I’m kinda weird, honestly. This stuff’s neat to me 😅
tl;dr: Code is law and defines the forms authority over a shared resource can take. We should always try to make our systems (social and otherwise) better, not settle for assumptions (that mods/admins will cooperate) and just shrugging when things go wrong. Also there are neat things we can try <.<