Has anyone looked at codifying community control of communities before? (communityrule.info)

submitted 11 months ago by fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Hello all, I am just curious if anyone has taken a tool like community rule to define how their instance or community control is handled? Even more so if there has been any effort to make the actual decision-making actionable by the system.

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[-] solrize@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

I'm sure it's been tried, but we know by now that anything that is codified gets gamed. You just have to act sensibly, and accept that if a big enough division of opinion on something occurs, the community will fork. That is a natural step of evolution and not something to get upset about.

[-] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 6 points 11 months ago

I read the about and still don't understand what it is or how it tries to accomplish what it's doing. I run a couple communities, I'd be interested in making a structure, but I have no idea what this tool is

[-] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

It seems to be a no code markdown editor for creating a community high-level description and key aspects. The lack of what to do next with that is bothering me at least personally. I feel like there is some step of taking this a actually plugging in proccess and people that is missing.

I personally, at the moment, just see it as a nice way to make a strategic choice what you WANT a community to be. With the rest of something left as a to-do kind defined by the strategic requirements.

[-] otter@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago

What kind of stuff would you be looking for? I'll see if I can focus on some aspects first

[-] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

In the Fediverse community context, I would say you have "Instances", "Communities", and "Users". Most communities operate in as a Benevolent Dictator .

Which is defined by the template like this: The Benevolent Dictator holds ultimate decision-making power, until the group is ready for a more inclusive structure.

Values: Servant leadership, singular vision, voluntarism
Membership: Participation is open to anyone who wants to join, but the Benevolent Dictator can remove participants at will.
Autocracy: The Benevolent Dictator has authority and can change the group's governance as necessary.
- Delegation: The Benevolent Dictator can invite participants to help with managing the group.
- Expiration: When the group is sufficiently mature, the Benevolent Dictator will establish a more inclusive structure.
- Executive: The Benevolent Dictator is responsible for implementing—or delegating implementation of—policies and other decisions.
- Lobbying: If participants are not happy with the Benevolent Dictator's leadership, they may voice their concerns or leave the group.

With the dictator being the Admin at the instance level, and the Mod at the community. With users being able to choose to leave to other dictators if they disagree with how they rule. A lot of these are implicitly allowed in the structure of lemmy, but if you wanted to explicitly define them, I am not sure what the best way would be. I.E. The Lobbying, how could you define how that is allowed or expected. Or defining what powers the autocrat has and explicitly saying to whom is delegated too at the moment.

There is also the idea of tooling to help move from dictatorships to something like elected boards or petition or even jury.

[-] machinin@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

This is a bit of a tangent, but I think there should be options for the type of community you set up. One kind is the traditional, moderator-controlled community. Another kind could be a more democratic community where members have more power (and responsibilities).

[-] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

That's kind of what I am going for!

[-] otter@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago

I had some rough work but haven't gotten around to posting for feedback. I might be misunderstanding it, but my thing was a "best practices" thing for communities and instances.

Planning to finish it up soon