I feel most problems in the world come from authoritarian decision making.
The
#fediverse is no exception. I've seen it too a few years ago in an other open source field.
We think distributing source code and allowing "anyone" to spin up an instance is enough to share power.
It's not. It's putting power into code able people's hands. Or at least into people's hands who are able to set up an instance which is far from every one.
Other people have to join an instance and abide by its rules. And most of the time rules are edicted by an autocrat. Some of these autocrat are or seem to be benevolents. That's good but it is not enough.
We have to think about our decision making processes. Moderating an instance of thousands of people can't be the privilege of a few.
Of course not everyone have time or will to do actual moderation work.
But everyone should be able to have a say in their instance moderation policy and not just choose between instances the moderation policy closest to what they want.
The tools to have this say should be baked into the software directly. Individual moderation tools such as blocking or configuring toot visibility are of essence. And it seems like
#bonefire is making stellar work in this direction. But we also need collective and collaborative tools to decide where we want to take communities we are parts of. Tools to take decisions together.
Discussion is the core feature of our systems. And we have polls, but actually using them for decision making is at the instance governing body's discretion and that's a frail tool for such a task. We need to imagine and implement other tools to allow instance users to suggest, promote and maybe enforce moderation and general policies. Such tools will allow discussing and choosing together paths regarding important issues like the
#meta situation at hand.
For example we could have voting systems embedded into the server software to decide if an instance should be blocked or not. And have such systems actually enforce the block.
We need democracy and we need to embed it in the server code because as it is, we are producing autocracy.
;