Notices by ⚗️⚗️⚗️ pnathan ⚗️⚗️⚗️ (pnathan@mastodon.social), page 10

Just finished White Flight, by Kevin Kruse.

A lot of thoughts. Holy crap, a lot of thoughts.

@msweet religious belief is one of the factors that guide morality under intense pressure.

First day at The New Job. New Employee Orientations, very orienting. Also, tiring.

I'm back in the #DevOps / #SRE type space, and I feel super good about that. Time to do serious self-education on #kubernetes.

AFK from mastodon for a few days, I expect. Family in town.

Ya'll have fun, I hope to refine and correct my ideas about governance when I get back.

@zlg Bluntly, techies without awareness of power gradients and proper process running the show is running the community internet into the ground. Hiring professional administrators is a normative practice outside of the foss space: you can always hire someone without moral qualms for a job, whether the job is angelic or evil.

In any case, my proposal is for large servers to form a organization to handle banning, rules, etc. And large servers should be democratically run.

@wion @aral a very good question! I didn't really poke it in the essay.

It's a second order question from the first order thesis I am posing, which is, "instances need a formal democratic governance", and "servers should arrange themselves in a formal governance process".

That thesis itself is controversial- I have a reply up thread which strenuously disagrees!

@wion @aral I think we are talking about two different things. Instances should be self funding and self governing. I propose paying money to get a funny colored picture on your profile as a means of incentivizing payment (help the board of directors pay your admin! Pay $5 for a gold star on your profile). I don't - could be wrong - see a USD as needing money ipso facto to run.

Maybe some instances want to be pay to play for governance. Maybe some don't. Federation allows both possibilities.

@wion @aral I can only offer suggestions for how this might work. My thesis is that the USF would be a governing body democratically and transparently setting the rules for membership.

@wion @aral to be honest, my hazy idea was that some instance users could pay their admins to be gold star members (like Reddit gold) as a funding source for admin salary.

@wion @aral I have the notion that an oligarchy (demi-centralization?) is the steady state of the fediverse. What's notable here is that there are serious dollar sums (i.e. paychecks) involved in having stable and reliable admins and mods(I should blog about operational reality sometime). That argues for some flavor of paidness ($5/mo for a gold star account?) and leaves a huge vulnerability to VCs gobbling the space.

A USF could effectively organize and resist the VC money.

Trump is popular with many people because of the tax cuts. Any human rights issues that happen to other people are not worthy of notice; there's $40 per month in one's pocket.

Political organization and discussion with centrists and independents who do not want Trump tossed out needs to directly address economics.

Many people are strictly dollars voters- morality is indifferent to them. Or, they believe government corruption is so bad that there's no point in chasing anything but the $.

@zlg my specific opinion and suggestion is that instances should be owned by members / non profit / etc and the admin and mods be hired guns subject to org policy.

In any case, I disagree deeply and will reply at length later.

@dredmorbius

thank you for your very kind words.

@bhaugen @dennis_reichel @woozle

Governance and the Fediverse

I assert that the big Mastodon servers need to actually form a formal working governance structure suitable for selecting who is federated with, along with ground rules for punitive actions on accounts. Entailed is the assertion that big instances should have formal internal governance structures separate from an admin's personal whims.

http://pnathan.com/blog/mastodon/2018-08-05-We-are-not-in-tech-anymore.html

I owe a huge debt to Jo Freeman's incredibly articulate discussion on these issues.

@bhaugen @dennis_reichel @dredmorbius @woozle

Governance & mastodon, some more coherent thoughts on my blog.

http://pnathan.com/blog/mastodon/2018-08-05-We-are-not-in-tech-anymore.html

Woozle, I really like your blog post on governance.