We have a "counsel of trusted users", it's the mod team who are committed to making our little democracy thrive. We don't want to be in control, we want to facilitate the community in choosing its own direction.

The simplicity of our process works in our favor. If somebody spun up 1000 alts to mess with a vote, we would notice. All of the discussions and votes happen publicly, so anyone can audit the profiles involved if things seem weird. I'll play whack-a-mole with bots every day if I need to, and that can also be audited on the publicly-visible modlog.

No system is perfect. This is the system we decided to try, despite the challenges that could arise from it.

The honest answer is that we're still trying to get The Agora running, and a backlog developed in the process. We are working on it, it's just going to take some time to sort through the old votes. We've been focused on cleaning up the process so we don't have this problem moving forward.

Now that we have a mod team in place for The Agora, this is our next priority. We're working on some preliminary guidelines based on previous discussions/votes that we'll be discussing soon.

For now, just know that we share your concerns. We want everyone to feel represented here, not just a vocal minority.

This feels like a gross overreaction to the situation. Sure, I don't love the fact that TD has a tiny presence here, but I fail to see how that should be cause to defed a large instance. Especially when that community just popped up recently, only came to anyone's attention in the last day or so, and (to my knowledge) hasn't caused any real trouble other than the Agora mod vote thread getting a bit spicy.

I'm sure it's something we'll need to address internally, but it's just one item on that list. And for now, it seems like a low priority item.

So far, we have a captcha on account creation now and it seems to be working (from what I've seen, anyway)

It'll be a tough balancing act though. Relatively frictionless sign-up has been great for us, and anything that deals with bots will also affect that. Whatever else we may end up doing will need to be carefully considered.

I don't even really think about it, I just comment if I have something to say. At worst, nobody reads it and I was shouting into the void for a minute.

But the Lemmy userbase isn't massive yet, so those week+ old posts still see more engagement than you'd think.

I can see both sides of this one, but I'd lean towards a lighter touch that focuses on intent. Someone can have a civil conversation while also swearing a lot (me irl), but it's a completely different story if they're trying to be inflammatory.

We probably won't need to codify this in the rules. Someone who would receive the hypothetical ban for this would probably be breaking other rules anyway.

Nay

While I do believe that defederation should be reserved for very serious cases, I don't think it needs to go as far as "egregiously illegal" before we consider it.

And to Lemmygrad specifically, they're the perfect example of why. They may not be the worst filth on the internet, but their reputation as a hive of tankies is casting a bad light on the entirety of Lemmy. Anybody connected to them is going to appear guilty by association, so defederation is a symbolic gesture as much as anything else.

Play store already had that behavior from at least the previous version, and just got the changed inbox behavior this morning. They're keeping parity between them pretty well.

They hit r/LemmyMigration and it's creator once already, right before they announced the Spez AMA. They were quietly unbanned after a while with claims of it being a "mistake".

I have a feeling they'll try a much more thorough purge soon, despite all evidence showing how disastrously that would backfire.

A lot of current users are young enough that they don't have any experience with those things, centralized services are all they've ever really known. The simplicity and convenience can be a huge draw for a lot of people.

These things sort themselves out organically with some time, but it looks and feels messy until then.

It's crazy that there are so any users already, but not a surprise. This kind of transparency is exactly what a lot of us were looking for, and it's the recipe for a thriving community going forward.

The "no porn" thing may upset some folks, but it makes sense. Porn can be a moderation (and liability) minefield, especially opening the floodgates right away. It could be a net-benefit at some point in the future, but until then it's easy enough to create an account on another instance that wants to take the heat.

And for what it's worth regarding the financial side, donations feel like the way to go. With everything Reddit is doing right now, and other platforms have done in the past, "outside money" is becoming the harbinger of doom for online communities. Plenty of us would be happy to pitch in to keep it in house, especially when you post those sexy resource graphs that would show exactly where our money is going.