Ahoy me hearties!

We were thinking this might be a good test run topic for instance voting in our !div0_governance@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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:

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 !div0_governance@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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.