Technically all communities are dictatorships
Don’t be so dramatic, the moderators are divinely inspired forming an absolute monarchy.
Not really. They inherently follow the rules of the maintainer. If that is some legal entity that has rules around its mission and governance other than dictatorship, then it’s that different thing.
There are Kings who own their instances like countries, and they set up (and shoot down) their Ministers/Mods who govern the people.
It is fully Autocratic.
Federations are diplomatic relations.
Some of these kings are mad, some don’t care and some ironically think kings and capitalists should be killed.
An interesting difference is no need to fight for land and resources, anyone can go and create another microstate.
Still, there is some benefit of larger states, they can resist spam better. But as much as they implement spam filters in the code, smaller instances can them. Political benefits of open source are real.
Communities growth is hindered by aggressive moderators. Communities are also hindered by the lack of moderation. For the larger communities you’ll see moderators that avoid bans, keep threads and comments within the TOS and Community rules, but largely have a laissez-faire attitude toward moderating. This leads to stronger growth and better communities.
I’d say LW largely falls under the effective altruistic philosophy.
A techno-biological hive mind where we speak as one.
If we achieved 1% hivemind, would that be enough hivemind for the hivemind to influence the situation? Influence it to increase that percentage, to bring about full instantiation.
50% might be enough for world domination.
The hivemind might be super smart. And it has a million voting/shopping eyes and fingers.
Otoh the level of conformity is already pretty outrageous. Consider world events over the past few years. We get a couple of “right ideas” and suddenly everybody is believing them 100%, quoting the same soundbites and persecuting unbelievers. Hivemind may be easier than we think.
Technocratic
Unless I’m misunderstanding how this whole thing works, it’d depend on the instance and community, wouldn’t it? If I set up my own instance, I can setup my own rules for the communities that might start there. Those community leaders may opt to set rules stricter than the instance rules.
If you go crazy enough, you get defederated like North Korea…
The only proper political model to implement is a tychacracy where all decisions are governed by pure random chance. Every single post shall have the following.
20% the is removed
20% the post is untouched
20% the post is pinned. If the pin count is limited, pins are organized by first in first out.
20% the user is banned for life with no chance for appeal
20% the user is made a moderator
May the odds be in your favor!
“best” is subjective, so there is no right answer to this
So offer your “subjective” opinion then. This ain’t rocket science.
This is really interesting, also in comparison to governance of “traditional” social networks.
I would not be surprised if someone did scientific research about it.
Democratic…
…mostly.
there is not almost any attempt to organize public participation. Except maybe admin posts with discussions in comments. Also users can vote with their feet.
I agree that the admin instinct is mostly honest and democratic and they should be regarded for their work. But the instance governance is mostly autocratic. And this kind of structure usually devolves in despotism, since power corrupts.
Would be nice to see an institution-based instance, with a constitution, elections, balance of power. Would be a great social experiment!
That means no moderators. I’m ok with that.
That might require “blocking” (extreme voting?). Which would be the equivalent of little bits of the democratic union freely seceding?
Moderators would be the government. A user blocking another one would be a restrictive order. An instance blocking another one would be a cold war. Voting is voting
Moderators would be the government
A democratic government must listen to the people.
A mod listens only to his own belly and maybe to the rules that he himself has set up (until the instance admin cancels him).
