/0 Governance

Background:

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

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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 ([email protected]). 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.

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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 [email protected] 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.

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Ahoy me hearties!

We were thinking this might be a good test run topic for instance voting in our [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 !a victory cup, orangered color 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 !a victory cup, orangered color for that. Instead, you get a snowflake !a snowflake, orangered color 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: a parrot, orangered colors 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