Hey peeps, 2 weeks ago we opened applications to onboard new instance admins. We had a ton of great people applying and just as we were getting ready to decide, I got struck down by the influenza b and completely flattened to my bed. Welp.
Well, no matter, I'm back now and decided to announce the new peeps we're onboarding to the admin team. Initially I was planning to just add one new person, but we got so many strong applications that I felt bad choosing just one.
So without further ado, our new admins are:
Both seem to have a history which appears to align well with our values and will provide fresh perspectives and experiences to our admin team. Peeps, feel free to introduce yourselves with as many details, pronouns, and/or fanfare as you prefer.
That out of the way, this brings our admin team to 6 members, which starts getting to the point where's the sheer amount of admins and users makes it more likely that conflict arises, either between admins, or between admins and the userbase. In most other forums, this kind of thing typically causes a closing of the ranks and/or internal purges of dissent with the site owner taking the role of the BDFL. We've seen it already with lemmy instances and the regular drama which hits meta-comms.
So, since I'm the actual owner and I hate nothing more than being a BDFL, I want to attempt something novel in this space. You see, one core concept of anarchism is instant recalls. As in, the people that represent any group for a specific project, are not representatives in the same way as in parliamentary democracy. Instead, they are there to follow the exact mandate given to them, and if they are seen as going against it, the people below them have the right to immediately recall their mandate. None of this "minimum a couple of years" and popularity contest shit which allows corruption in.
I want to attempt something similar in our instance. I don't quite know how well it's going to work, but I'm willing to give it a try. The way it's going to work, the admin team is considered to have a mandate from the userbase to do admin shit. We don't want to be calling a vote for every ban and improvement after all. However as a counter-balance, any stakeholder gets the right to initiate recall vote against any admin, including myself. The vote will be run at a 75% threshold to remove, using the governance community.
However due to the impact of such votes, the hope is that perhaps we can sort things out before it gets to it, so the expectation is that people will first open a "sense check" thread in governance to talk about it before taking it to a vote. But if things have reached a head, then a recall vote is there to check our instance admin power.
The remaining admins of course are expected to replace any removed admins to ensure the good instance operation.
I did say that you can even recall myself if you so voted, however there's indeed some hard realities we can't get around. I still control the servers and the domain, and it's not possible to enforce their management based on such votes. So I will still ultimately be able to interfere, but I promise that even if I'm removed, I will only step in to ensure the instance recall functionality is respected. Ultimately this is an experiment that I want to attempt so I'm willing to roll with whichever way it goes.
Now there's one more thing of concern, which is about someone gaming the system. This is not all set up to be super rigorous. I'm hoping our relative obscurity and super-low stakes will prevent anyone attempting to game the system. Likewise, if foul play is suspected, I am still as a failsafe to recover.
You might be asking yourselves: Why do this? Why even mess with this sort of radicalism when the BDFL approach is tried and tested. The answer is because...well, power corrupts. Having power over people does something to one's brain, mates. So many times I've seen well meaning people turn to shit because they felt they were the only ones who knew best and could protect people from themselves. I don't want that. Every BDFL approach eventually creates internal cliques, mistrust, "good ole boy clubs" and such. I base my life in trying to shed as much hierarchical power from myself as possible and it hasn't led me astray, and if we want to change this shit world we're living in, we need to try things that don't repeat the same shitty structures. So while I can't do something perfect, I'm willing to do something flawed and see how far it takes us.
So yeah, welcome the new mods and tell us what you think.
PS: We also upgraded to Lemmy 0.19.9.
