Edit: Shit, I probably should have made the title plural - “Does Lemmy need charters?”
From the great discussion below, some clarifying thoughts:
- Not advocating for a SINGLE charter, and less of a system and more of a… convention.
- In my universe, groups of instances could get together and come up with some common governing strategies that set them apart from other instances.
- Given common strategies, other instances can opt in to get in on that sweet, ethical branding.
- What I sketched out below was thinking specifically around what a single charter could look like addressing the immediate issues facing Lemmy to date. A prototype for the convention, even.
/Edit
Looooong time r/all lurker here, something like 10+ years on reddit with maybe 10 comments. I’ve seen a lot go down.
I’m seeing a lot of hand wringing around defederating Meta, Threads, and even handling problematic instances within the Lemmyverse itself.
It’s tiring to see these things come into consideration on a case by case basis, completely decontextualized from earlier crises. And the patterns are all too familiar - the big ones lately have been around (to name a few things):
- Adopt-Extend-Extinguish (https://lemmy.world/post/467454)
- the corrosion of commercialization
- the never-ending gyre of “Free Speech” vs The Overton Window (nazis are bad, vaccines are good)
This definitely isn’t a new idea, but at in these early days of the Lemmyverse, we can take our collective past experiences, good and bad, on other social media networks, and define some sort of Lemmy charter that sets standards for ethos and quality control. I’ll start:
- Don’t federate with for-profit or commercial institutions
- TBD
Because we’re done with the for-profit, commercial web, right? In the last couple of days, my brain has taken all the all the Lemmy posts and comments on the subject, mashed it all up, distilled it, and keeps coming back to this idea of non-profit/non-commercial entities.
but y tho?
Because loose, institutional underpinnings could, like a mycelial network, feed the Lemmyverse. And mycelial networks are dope.
Here’s a proposed methodology:
- Initial Core* Lemmy instances define a charter of guidelines about behavior, ethos, standards
- Lemmy instances that adopt the charter get known as “Charter Instances”
- Charter instances have a say in the upkeep and development of Charter… things.
*We’d have to think about what that initial “Core” means - maybe the first X instances to have reached Y number of users? Beyond bragging rights that They Were There when the charter was created, no other special status would be conferred.
And because I’m an anarcho-syndicalist:
- Charter status is basically just a blue checkmark that just says “hey, we’re cool, folks”
- An instance can walk away from the charter, no biggie
- Charter instances can determine if another instance is violating the charter and take away their status, or choose to update the charter to be inclusive
- Instances wouldn’t be limited to just the charter for guiding principles once adopted, instances can do whatever
- The charter should probably be Super High Level, descriptive rather than prescriptive, to allow communities decide how to interpret and implement
And because I have ADHD, and this is currently over-stimulating my brain:
- Different charters developed by different communities! Mix and match! Merge!
- Creation of a Charter .org non-profit foundation that provides material support to new or struggling instances!
- and compensation for software maintainers!
- and legal support when necessary!
- and maybe maintains the technical specification of what makes a lemmy a lemmy!
Alright, ADHD has run its course. Back to lurking for another 10 years.
I don’t know that a formal charter is required, but I do think that it is important that all instance admins do a couple of things:
- Develop and publish a moderation policy in some form
- Determine and publish criteria by which they decide when to defederate from another instance
There isn’t one right answer for either of those things, and the point isn’t to ensure everybody passes a purity test. It’s to set expectations for users on the instance, users on other instances who may participate in communities on the instance, and other instance admins.
Well-thought-out policies will be copied and forked by other new instances, and that will create consensus communities of instances that are at least on the same page when it comes to how a site is supposed to work.
It will also be helpful for the community to be able to talk about things like what instances have a lot of bad actors or poor moderation, something similar to #fediblock on Mastodon. The issues that mods face and that individuals targeted for harassment face are often invisible to the average joe user, and can also be invisible to admins if they aren’t actively encountering reports themselves. #fediblock creates a place – sometimes fractious, yes – where folks can ensure that those issues are visible and give admins an opportunity to determine whether or not they need to take action.
But nobody will read a charter, just as nobody reads privacy policies. Do you?
OP seems to be suggesting a simplified “label” system, based on easy-to-grasp criteria. To me this looks like a much more sensible solution than yet more opaque blocks of TOS.
For example, there could be colored badges. A green one might mean non-profit, and red might mean “careful, anything goes here”, or whatever.
A possible inspiration: the Creative Commons codes (CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, CC-BY-NC, etc).
IMO it is crucial to keep all this as simple as possible. It should not be necessary to spend 10 minutes parsing a block of text to understand the essentials about a community.
I’m very anti one charter - my intention here is to propose the idea of charters as a way for communities to sort of balance each other out, solve each other’s problems and avoid reinventing each other’s wheels.
Well-thought-out policies will be copied and forked by other new instances, and that will create consensus communities of instances that are at least on the same page when it comes to how a site is supposed to work.
Yeah, pretty much this, but with some mechanism - literally at an icon level - to indicate to users (lemmings, lemurs, lemurians?), who aren’t necessarily keyed into inter-instance politics, and just want to see their memes, that “this instance follows the No-Nazis charter, which I like, and the rest of the charter members agree. Cool.”
If you organize too much it is a weak point that can be purchased by corporate entities. Be careful about elevating people to a point where an individual or small group has too much power. Funds are virtually unlimited, and everyone has a price they can’t say no to.
Don’t federate with for-profit or commercial institutions
And right from the first point you have gone against the whole point of the Fediverse. ActivityPub is an open protocol. Anyone can implement it and use it. Anyone can federate with anyone they choose.
Placing “non-commercial” restrictions on it is legally infeasible, and not desirable. What happens if an instance has a donation address? Or if it decides to run some ads to support itself? Or creates some kind of “premium” tier with a fee? What if a company decides to create an instance to run the “official” forum for the games or other software they publish, is that a commercial instance? Who’s going to decide these things?
If you want to argue that some specific instance shouldn’t federate with some other specific instance, or some specific instance should have its own “charter” that it uses to make those decisions with, sure whatever. But in no way would I support a “charter” that applies to all instances.
And anyone can decide to not allow bad faith actors (capitalists) to connect with their instance.
This is the paradox of intolerance playing out. We have no obligation to enable these scum.
The concept of having a “charter” for Lemmy doesn’t seem to mesh with “anyone can decide.”
OP has since edited their post to backpedal from that concept, but I’m not sure what the point of calling for instance-specific “charters” are - it just codifies the “anyone can decide” thing, which doesn’t need codifying.
it just codifies the “anyone can decide” thing, which doesn’t need codifying.
As I understood the idea, it is about comparability, and readability, through unification.
Each instance can decide for itself, and most align with what I like. But I still have to figure it out for each instance individually. By finding where they post that information, understand how the information is structured, note they did not specify something the others did specify in their prose, and so on.
If we codify what key-value pairs make up this information, and where this data should be displayed, comparing becomes much easier.
It also allows automatic comparison. Imagine I could filter in instance browsers for policies which I do or do not want my instance to have.
This seems a very decent idea. Disappointed I didn’t think of it myself.
The non-profit criterion is so important. Profit means advertising, and advertising means attention-whoring, psychological manipulation, spying, and basically everything that is ruining the internet. Advertising is a moral abyss.
As an example, mastodon has the “Mastodon Covenant” which must be agreed to before an instance is listed on joinmastodon.org
https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
While it is only enforceable by the people running joinmastodon and the only penalty is removal from the directory, I have seen it cited as a reason for defederation.
