Hi mateys,

We are currently recruiting for people who are able to volunteer some of their time each day to help out with site admin tasks. You don't need to have any special skills or technical qualifications, but there are a few other requirements listed below. We'd also prefer applicants who are active posters, and/or who have actively participated in our Matrix channels.

This recruitment drive is to ensure we maintain a good level of admin coverage throughout the day, so that reports and applications can be dealt with quickly.

I would also totally understand if you prefer to apply privately, so you always have the option of sending me or one of the other admins a PM.

I'm re-using db0's previous admin application text below, with just a few edits where needed:

If you are interested, these are the full requirements:

Requirements

• You must be an anarchist, and enthusiastically endorse the instance policies and our anarchist code of conduct. For example this means we also expect you to also be pro-piracy and not hostile to GenAI.
• You must have been on this instance for at least 3 months, to ensure you understand our culture. Hopefully you've been a lemmy poster as well as we expect our admins to dogfood our service. If you were already a comm admin, even better!
• We are still prioritizing women and/or PoC to reinforce our team's diverse perspectives. So please apply if you are even if you think you might not qualify.
• At this point we are prioritizing timezones and countries outside of Europe and the USA to help us get better coverage and better perspectives.
• You must be willing to use matrix as this is where we organize our instance and our real-time admin chat.
• You must be willing to keep an eye on reports and applications throughout the day.

What is expected of you

• We have a fairly chill community around this place, so it's not too demanding. The time requirements are not too large and we will keep expanding the team to ensure the load per individual admin remains low. So long as using this instance is your primary social media, the "workload", such as it is, shouldn't even be noticable.
• Initiative is encouraged. It's cool enough for people to just want to help us keep this place tidy, but if you have ideas, you will be free to put them into action directly without asking permission all the time, so long as we can rollback easily.
• You should have a anarchist democratic mindframe. We don't need a voting decision on everything (just do direct action), but you should be willing to be judged on your decisions and roll them back if they are unpopular.
• Remember that while we're anarchist-flavored, we're not just for anarchists. So we understand that many of our users might be liberals or otherwise misguided. On top of that, we make a point of welcoming neurodivergent people who don't always understand social norms and might phrase things in a way that looks really bad when interpreted uncharitably. As such, we want to help people match our values, without turning a misunderstanding into a hostile experience through heavy-handed actions. So a softer hand and charitability is encouraged, while at the same time being firmly against clearly reactionary takes.

Applying

• You can leave your comments here, which can allow other members of this comm to vouch for you.
• Please mention your "credentials" and why you think you would make a good member of the team.
• If you don't feel comfortable with sharing info, you can reach out to me on matrix or PMs (or another admin you feel more comfortable with).

Spectating

If you're just watching this governance thread, feel free to upvote applications you feel are worthy, and/or comment on people you want to vouch for. If you're a supporter, remember you can also vouch for people directly through a threativore PM.

• governance type: sense check
• show all flair

Update: Thanks mateys for participating! Our instance was really split down the middle on this vote - 49% in favour, 51% against.

After reading all the comments, it honestly seems unlikely to me that private voting will ever be a viable option for Lemmy in any meaningful way, because voting data gets federated out all across the fediverse, so I think on balance the best way forward is just to accept that reality and work under the assumption all votes are public. At least then nobody is lulled into a false sense of security.

Having said that there's an argument to be made for both sides and I don't think there's a "right" answer necessarily. Its more down to personal preference about whether you want/expect private (to the users) voting, or you want to embrace public voting. But until Lemmy can guarantee the privacy of user votes then simply pretending they are private seems like the worst of both worlds.

We might revisit the topic of public/private voting again down the road if Lemmy's developers provide privacy enhancements in that area though.

Cheers, Unruffled.

Hi again mateys!

As most of you are probably aware, since the development of Lemvotes Lemmy votes are no longer private for users.

The way lemvotes works right now afaik, is it uses an admin level account to collect voting data from all federated instances, thus enabling the identification of every voter. This method effectively bypasses the guardrails the developers put in place to keep this info more restricted.

However, the developer of lemvotes has recently developed an "opt out" for instances that don't want their user data collected in this way. So now we have a choice of whether or not to continue. For total transparency, I asked the developer to create an opt out because I wanted to give our users the option to choose that path without defederating from the lemvotes instance.

I think there are (at least) two schools of thought on this topic, which I will attempt to succinctly summarize below:

1. Votes should be kept private to users as they were only ever meant to be viewable by instance admins. Making votes public to everyone via lemvotes, when users have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to voting, is a betrayal of user trust. It also leads to arguments and a lot of unnecessary drama, caused by users trawling though each others' vote histories.

2. It's good that voting is transparent and that users have the same tools available as admins to conduct their own investigations into other users. This creates a level playing field and helps hold everyone accountable for their voting patterns.

So now you have some of the context, I'd like to ask our community what are your thoughts on lemvotes... is it a social good or a bad idea?

Personally, I quite like it from an admin perspective - it's a handy tool, and a pretty cool project. But I also have an expectation (mainly from other forms of social media) that users' votes should be kept private from other users, so I still think it's problematic from that perspective.

Proposal: To opt out of lemvotes, so that our users' voting data is kept (at least somewhat) private.

• To vote FOR the proposal to succeed, upvote the post.
• To vote AGAINST the proposal, downvote the post.

This will be a simple majority vote. Similar to the last governance topic, I have no clue what the instance sentiment is towards lemvotes, so let's find out! Feel free to add your comments below.

I was encouraged to create an governance thread for discussion dedicated to community focused around the db0 lemmy instance users. Please see the linked post for context. I decided to leave my original post for potential discussion including voices of outsiders.

In short, not to duplicate information - I'd like to ask our community the following questions:

1. Is the mod's behaviour of proactively banning users from moderated communities without clear violation in accordance to the instance rules, especially The Golden Rules, which call for "cooperative participation"?
2. If yes, what actions can be proposed to be taken next to alleviate the issue, not only with the two directly mentioned communities in the linked post, but also others that potentially fall a victim to this kind of mod misbehaviour?

It should also be appropriate to hear the stance of the involved moderators, why they do what they do, but obviously it is up to them to provide clarifications.

Thank you in advance, I love you all.

governance type: sense check

Update: Although we officially still have a few days remaining on this vote, it seems clear that this proposal won't be voted in.

Thanks to everyone for their feedback and votes! I had expected a split vote on this one and it turned out around 1/3 for the proposal and 2/3 against, so that is a quite emphatic no! And of course, we will respect the vote.

I hope we can maybe revisit our instance blocking policies more generally after lemmy has properly working per-user instance blocks, as some folks commented as it will open up more options for personal choice. For example, we could keep a list of sanctioned instances (like csam site) as it works now, but maintain a separate list of "use with caution" instances (aka hesitations in fediseer) that are blocked by default in each user's personal blocklist. But now users could choose to enable those sites for themselves if they wanted to.

For me, that seems like the best overall solution for user choice, and for the new user experience. But it may not sound good to you folks, so that's why we have the voting system in place so we can get quality feedback and also hopefully generate ideas for improvements that will benefit the community.

On that note, anyone can contact me or any of the site admins if they have a proposal they want to appear here on the governance community, and we'll be happy to help you out.

Unruffled

Hi mateys. I'm gonna keep this short and sweet because I don't really have any skin in the game on this one. I am in fact quite happy to leave this decision up to the wider dbzer0 community. On that note, please do not comment on this post unless you are a dbzer0 user - we'd prefer not to have anyone else weighing in.

This post isn't to convince anyone to re-federate or otherwise. In fact, our admin team genuinely doesn't know for sure what our community sentiment is on the topic, or whether or not it's worth a try. My guess is that the community will be quite divided on the topic, as many users are on the topic of hexbear. But the only way to find out for sure is to ask you, so here we are.

But I will say that for me personally, although we still have the occasional drama, and despite past run-ins, I have slowly grown to appreciate having some hexbear users around to help balance out all the turbolibs. While I think its fair to say our instance and theirs will never see eye-to-eye on certain topics, we have coexisted with them in relative calm over the past 12 months. If we can achieve ~~harmony~~a ceasefire with hexbear, then maybe we could do the same with lemmygrad?

I'd also prefer our users to make their own choices with regard to instance blocking of leftist sites in particular.

Obviously there will be some folks here that will hate this idea, and some who think it is worth a try and/or would like to make their own choices with regards to blocking. All I will ask is that you go have a look at lemmygrad.ml before you vote, and ask yourself if there is anything posted there you think warrants keeping them defederated?

Because this might be a divisive topic, I'm setting the threshold for this proposal succeeding at >66.6% majority rather than the default >50% so that there is a clear mandate.

The proposal is as follows:

That dbzer0 removes lemmygrad.ml from our blocked instances list for a 1-month trial period. Another vote will then be conducted to either federate permanently or to reinstate the instance block.

Notes

• AFAIK none of our admins have discussed this with lemmygrad prior to this post, so we don't know how they will respond, even if this vote succeeds. But having just checked, we are not currently blocked from their end, so in theory re-federating will be a straightforward process (at least technically).
• We really don't want to cause a big rift in our instance over this, so please there is really no need to get into heated arguments (I mean, what are the chances? Lol). Your vote is what counts most and we will commit to be guided by the voting outcome.
• If this vote succeeds we will reach out to their admins to see if we can come to some mutual agreement about reintegrating our communities while hopefully keeping conflict to a minimum. Having said that, some conflict is probably inevitable ngl. But I think we will be able to ride it out ok.
• I've covered a lot of concerns and talked about conflict a lot, so I'll just add that the big positive of re-federating is that there will be a ton of new users and content to interact with, which will hopefully add to the Lemmy experience for our users if the proposal is voted in.

expiry: 7

Might be a good idea to deprecate https/t.lemmy.dbzer0.com .

(See this post)

Ahoy me hearties!

To run alongside the discussion on the simplified Golden Rules for the instance, I decided to post a separate proposal for a single rule addition.

The proposed rule is: Off topic comments and downvote trolling to protest the use of genAI images is not permitted in our communities.

Edit2: The community feedback has been strongly positive, thanks for all your feedback. Notably, quite a few folks would like it to be more generic, to cater for future scenarios as well. So taking that into account, and adding the rationale for the change, I came up with:

To protect our communities, community members and mods from abuse: no comment trolling, dogpiling, or downvote trolling is allowed.

I hope that works for most folks, and please feel free to leave more comments if you can suggest an improved wording. I do read them all.

It would only apply to communities where GenAI art is not disallowed by the community rules, so mods can opt in or out.

Since the rule will likely attract some pushback from the anti-GenAI crowd, I wanted to run this proposal as a member vote to confirm we have broad support.

Exhibit 1 - dbzer0 Main Sidebar for context

Be Weird, Download a Car, Generate Art, Screw Copyrights

Communities about Anarchism, Generative AI, Copylefts, Neurodivergence, Filesharing, and Free Software.

Our instance has been associated with genAI art since its inception, because the founding admin, db0, has also spent years developing and maintaining FOSS Projects like AI Horde (a crowdsourced distributed cluster of image generation workers and text generation workers) and Haidra.

We have a number of popular genAI communities on our instance including:

• !Stable Diffusion Art
• !Stable Diffusion Anime
• !Stable Diffusion Mycology
• !Imaginary Witches

Exhibit 2 - The Problem

This is the recent experience of one of our community mods:

"From the moment I started the [redacted] community here people have been brigading it trying to suppress it, and had I not had the sense to ban the droves of anti-AI trolls who come to downvote it into oblivion. They probably would be continuing to do so in insanely large volume. A lot of the users who come to downvote do so with empty no content accounts, but a lot are also trolls from the !fuck_AI@lemmy.world community. I’ve also received a fair amount of harassment including threats and bad faith accusations from it like people saying I’m a pedophile or saying I’m pretending to be nonbinary over the fact that I like and use genAI. Really awful behavior that has no place on this instance of this community."

This sort of thing is hateful and should not have to be tolerated by our users. Let's call it what it is: bullying and harassment.

Exhibit 3 - Escalating Problems

If you take look at this post from today in the lighthearted Lefty Memes community, it's a total shit show of offtopic comments. I'm not going to re-litigate the whole experience here since there is a YPTB post about it here.

This sort of brigading is completely unwarranted and I regard it as hostile bullying behaviour towards our community members and moderators. It completely derails the comments and goes way off topic for the community. Even after repeatedly asking these users to open a meta post about the issues they clearly wanted to talk about, instead of brigading the comments, I was mostly ignored and eventually pretty much gave up on trying to moderate the post.

Conclusion

In summary, as an admin on this instance I've noticed a significant uptick in the amount and volume of trolling in our communities by this group of users. I'd like to make sure we have this rule in place so that we can continue to effectively moderate the instance for the enjoyment of our community members, and to protect our moderators and admins from abuse.

Thank you for your consideration. If you have any suggestions to improve the rule, or thoughts on the topic you wish to share, then please do so in the comments.

Edit: for detailed voting information see this post. But in summary, please upvote if you support the rule addition or downvote if you are opposed.

Hey peeps, do you have some lemmy instances that you think are cool? We maintain an endorsement list on the fediseer which has gotten a bit stale lately so I think it would be cool to endorse some of the new instances popping up to help raise awareness about their existence and reward admins doing a good job.

I thought I'd just add some myself, but why take all the responsibility myself when we can crowdsource it?

So if you have any fediverse instances (not just lemmy!) you think our instance should be endorsing, please do mention them here, along with the reasons why (see the other examples in our endorsements).

governance type: sense check

FINAL UPDATE

@bdonvr, admin of The Lemmy Club has, in my opinion, responded in good faith to the concerns raised in this post, and so I have withdrawn my proposal for defederation. In summary:

1. They will no longer be allowing conservative/right wing communities on their instance
2. A couple of accounts were banned ( marathon and Bernard )
3. "realcaseyrollins decided to voluntarily close /c/news@thelemmy.club, /c/censorshipnews@thelemmy.club, and /c/opeds@thelemmy.club."

Personally, I think this is just about the ideal outcome, and I hope this will convince folks to give The Lemmy Club another chance.

The Lemmy Club is currently suffering from "The Nazi Bar" problem. All of their top communities are run by three right-wingers as illustrated below.

The Lemmy Club instance admin doesn't seem to want to ban them, for the reasons mentioned below:

This vote is on whether or not we should defederate from this instance until they address their Nazi Bar problem.

Upvote = for defederation. Downvote = against defederation.

Edit: As others have mentioned, happy to treat this a only a temporary measure until the problem is resolved.

Edit 2: The Lemmy Club admin has said they will implement a rule against right wing communities, and has taken action on some problematic posts and users (see original comments below).

I'm willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to the admin here, as they have responded in good faith:

If you implement those changes then I’d be willing to withdraw the defederation proposal and consider the problem resolved.

Hey peeps, after hitting the frontpage of reddit, we got a good amount of new users on our instance, to the point where our admin team was struggling to keep up with the application forms.

More users means more issues and therefore more reports, so we are looking to onboard one more admin to the instance. If you are interested, these are the requirements:

Requirements

• You must be an anarchist, and enthusiastically endorse the instance policies and our anarchist code of conduct. For example this means we also expect you to also be pro-piracy and not hostile to GenAI.
• You must have been on this instance for at least 3 months, to ensure you understand our culture. Hopefully you've been a lemmy poster as well as we expect our admins to dogfood our service. If you were already a comm admin, even better!
• At this point we are prioritizing women and/or PoC to reinforce our team's diverse perspectives. So please apply if you are even if you don't feel as confident.
• At this point we are prioritizing timezones and countries outside of Europe and the USA to help us get better coverage and better perspectives.
• You must be willing to use matrix as this is where we organize our instance and our real-time admin chat.
• You must be willing to keep an eye on reports and applications throughout the day.

What is expected of you

• We have a fairly chill community around this place, so it's not too demanding. The time requirements are not too large and we will keep expanding the team to ensure the load per individual admin remains low. So long as using this instance is your primary social media, the "workload", such as it is, shouldn't even be noticable.
• Initiative is encouraged. It's cool enough for people to just want to help us keep this place tidy, but if you have ideas, you will be free to put them into action directly without asking permission all the time, so long as we can rollback easily.
• You should have a anarchist democratic mindframe. We don't need a voting decision on everything (just do direct action), but you should be willing to be judged on your decisions and roll them back if they are unpopular.
• Remember that while we're anarchist-flavored, we're not just for anarchists. So we understand that many of our users might be liberals or otherwise misguided. On top of that, we make a point of welcoming neurodivergent people who don't always understand social norms and might phrase things in a way that looks really bad when interpreted uncharitably. As such, we want to help people match our values, without turning a misunderstanding into a hostile experience through heavy-handed actions. So a softer hand and charitability is encouraged, while at the same time being firmly against clearly reactionary takes.

Applying

• You can leave your comments here, which can allow other members of this comm to vouch for you.
• Please mention your "credentials" and why you think you would make a good member of the team.
• If you don't feel comfortable with sharing info, you can reach out to me (or another admin you feel more comfortable with) through PMs or matrix.

Spectating

If you're just watching this governance thread, feel free to upvote applications you feel are worthy, and/or comment on people you want to vouch for. If you're a supporter, remember you can also vouch for people directly through a threativore PM.

• governance type: sense check
• show all flair

Background:

August 26, 2024 a dbzer0 instance admin instance banned a user, @marcie@lemmy.ml per "Sanctioned mod due to slanderous & unsubstantiated community ban and zero response to appeal. Ban to be lifted once issue is resolved."

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=9924804

From what I could gather, she received the instance ban after banning an instance member from a community (!transgender@lemmy.ml). Whether or not the community ban is justified doesn't really seem to be an issue here, an instance ban is an extreme response to a community ban and is inherently an unbalanced action that has vastly different ramifications. This means that no local users can interact with or see the instance banned user compared to one local user not being able to interact with one community on a different instance. The instance ban has much deeper implications than a community ban and should not be used rashly in response to a community ban.

https://lemmy.ml/modlog/14758?page=1&actionType=All&userId=892112

Something that may be worth to note is that the community banned user is a dbzer0 instance admin; however, I don't see how this could be much of an issue here, especially in terms of moderation, as there are other unbanned instance admins that can access that community. It just seems that this ban was done for personal reasons, possibly in revenge, that perhaps don't align with this instance's userbase's interests.

In fact, being an admin here seems to be part of the reason why it occurred. i.e. Would this instance ban have occurred if the moderator had banned a non-admin user?

If an instance ban on a moderator banning a local user is an appropriate course of action in this instance, then why is this not the case for any other users banned? I have never received an instance ban for community banning users, but should I be banned? Should db0 be banned from dbzer0 for community banning users? Should all community moderators be sanctioned?

Obviously, there isn't a precedent for this here, and I particularly don't want one and this is not a proposal to enact one. This is a proposal to reverse an instance ban on a user who I believe is unjustly banned, as an instance ban is not an appropriate response to a single community ban.

Although, if the admin is upset about the community ban, I implore him to visit !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com rather than pinging the user who's replies cannot even been seen here due to the ban (https://lemmy.ml/post/22023367/14664616) (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/14455427).

UPDATE: Proposal approved, see https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36484194 for policy change announcement.

Ahoy me hearties!

We were thinking this might be a good test run topic for instance voting in our !div0_governance@lemmy.dbzer0.com community. Please be patient with us if anything breaks or isn't working properly. Feedback is welcome.

The voting topic

Given the current political backdrop and recent video of Elon Musk performing clearly identifiable Nazi salutes at the Presidential inauguration, some communities have started banning all links to X/Twitter. A couple of examples I noticed yesterday:

• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36070488
• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36080853

The vote is on whether our instance should follow suit and implement an instance-wide ban on X/Twitter links in posts and comments.

I've noticed some people suggesting allowing screenshots to still be used (e.g. for memes). Feel free to drop a comment if you have an opinion on that.

How to vote

Simply upvote or downvote this post. The /0 Bot will automatically calculate and update a tally of votes every 15 mins or so according to the voting rules (so don’t expect instant updates). An upvote is counted in favour of the resolution. A downvote is counted as against the resolution.

Note regarding crossposting: please be aware that only votes on the original post in !div0_governance@lemmy.dbzer0.com will be counted.

When to vote

Voting starts as of now. We'll close voting once the flow of votes stops - not sure exactly when that will be yet, but I'd like to keep the topic open for at least 2 or 3 days (maybe a week?) to give everyone a chance to vote.

Who can vote

TLDR here is that anyone can vote, but your votes will be weighted differently depending if you are a financial supporter, local instance member or external instance member.

As discussed in the announcement post, the initial plan was that only stakeholders can vote and open threads. That now includes everyone who is supporting us with any monthly donation amount.

Voting rights have also been extended so that votes of other local instance members who otherwise have no voting rights will be accounted at a rate of 1/100 from a random sample of up to 1000 of their votes. This means that a vote can go up to max +/- 10 from local community votes and it’s a fractional count (i.e. +1.1, or -0.7) which should make the local community sentiment an excellent tiebreaker, without overwhelming the people who are directly supporting the instance. Furthermore, I decided to display the “outsider sentiment” which is votes from non-valid-voting users from other instances. The outsider sentiment is only flavour (“Positive”, “Negative” etc) and is disregarded from the total. This is just shown for reference of the outsider sentiment which I think might be useful.

What constitutes a successful vote on a topic?

We are totally open to debate on this. I was thinking for this topic, a 2/3 majority vote would be a good target to aim for so we can be certain the community vote represents a clear majority of our users' opinions.

My thinking here is that if some topics are split close to 50/50 then achieving a 51% vote for example does not produce a clear mandate and may simply cause unnecessary division.

Having said that, I acknowledge a 2/3 majority is an arbitrary choice, but unless we implement a more complex voting system hopefully it is "good enough" to indicate a clear majority. As mentioned previously, feedback is very welcome and we will review and make adjustments where necessary.

Community participation

I strongly encourage all our instance members as well as subscribers from different instances to vote on this topic. If we only get a small handful of votes it's not going to be very representative of overall sentiment. This is a test run, so if things don't work out in terms of participation we will re-assess and perhaps revisit the topic.#

As mentioned in the previous post, the Governance community is now live. I have refactored my affiliations lookup script to be more accurate and have added everyone's application affiliation to their threativore flairs.

I want to say, y'all are pretty creative and keep coming up with favorites I've never heard before. I still have quite a lot of uncategorized answers to go through, but most of you have been assigned a tag.

As a way to reward people who are coming up with unique answers, the first person who registers with a new favorite, also gets the first emoji assigned.

A few of you seem to mention people who are neither anarchists, pirates nor foss (advocates). Usually, and unless that person is a complete reactionary or PoS, we let you through. However you don't get a first for that. Instead, you get a snowflake flair, because you're special like that 😜

Finally, quite a few people registered before we even had an application form with which to request your affiliation. So as to recognize all you early birds, I have now added a fresh flair early_bird and is something nobody else will be able to get ;) Thanks for sticking around here for the past 2 years!

So without further ado, here's the updated stats from this run. I will do another run once I've categorized everything I don't know yet

Analysis Results:
-----------------
Historical Pirate: 538 (9.9%)
Digital Pirate: 1223 (22.6%)
Fictional Character: 584 (10.8%)
FOSS advocate: 1673 (30.9%)
Free Software: 631 (11.6%)
Anarchist: 779 (14.4%)
Other: 165 (3.0%)
Unparseable: 0 (0.0%)

Total Answers Analyzed: 5420
Answers matching multiple categories: 984

Top Mentions per Category:
---------------------------
Historical Pirate: Blackbeard (286), Anne Bonny (48), Zheng Yi Sao (32)
Digital Pirate: Fitgirl (221), Aaron Swartz (205), Empress (106)
Fictional Character: Captain Jack Sparrow (252), Luffy (79), Dread Pirate Robers (54)
FOSS advocate: Linus Torvalds (566), Richard Stallman (476), Louis Rossmann (116)
Free Software: Lemmy (351), Linux (188), Gnu (39)
Anarchist: Emma Goldman (113), Kropotkin (98), Chomsky (66)
Other: Elon Musk (30), Openai (20), O'Reilly (19)

Btw: I've set up this thread in governance for a reason. If you leave a comment here, the bot will reply to you, with your list of flairs. (Still waiting for a UI designer to step up and integrate them on the UI itself 😅)

If you think I've made a mistake with your flairs, let me know.

• governance type: sense check
• show all flair

votgy vot