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.
Note that while votes from stakeholders have more weight. However each stakeholder (i.e. anyone supporting us and MVPs
) can vouch for 2 others which will also give them a proper vote. Vouching can be done with a special PM to the bot .So If you cannot support the instance financially, but feel you’ve been a valuable member of this instance nonetheless, please leave a comment and hopefully people will vouch for you. If this happens, your votes will be automatically counted on the next bot run.
PS: To see the vote tally, make sure you don’t have @div0@lemmy.dbzer0.com (or all bots) blocked
deleted by creator
Acknowledged governance topic opened by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/flatworm7591
This is a simple majority vote. The current tally is as follows:
- For:
(1), 
(5), 
(6), (3), 
(3) - Against:
- Local Community: +1.9
- Outsider sentiment: Positive
- Total: +19.9
- Percentage: 100.00%
This vote will complete in 5 days
Reminder that this is a pilot process and results of voting are not set in stone.
- For:
Really, I think that direct links should’ve been at least heavily discouraged if not banned outright the moment that Vichy Twitter started requiring an active login to follow them.
Now that Musk has dropped the last vestiges of his mask and revealed himself as a nazi, links absolutely should be banned. Nobody here should ever provide that nazi cesspit with even one single click.
The only thing Musk cares about more than imposing his warped vision on the world is money. He needs to be denied both.
Boycotts are one of two real effective ways of killing monopolies. It’s like their kryptonite.
Any boycott against a facist corporate hegemony is a go from me.
Appreciate you and fuck nazis
I’ve never had a Twitter account so I vote get rid of it.
I am all for it. Ban away.
If this passes I think a good approach is to ban all links to twitter and to alternative frontends, and to ban screenshots etc. showcasing a characteristic look of twitter.
Screenshots of xcancel would be allowed (I think it is unrealistic telling the various themes appart from mastodon etc.), my main hope though is that it leads to people uploading files on lemmy and copying the text into the post/comment body, securing and dissociating the content, and also displacing twitter in search results.
All that with minor or no sourcing, at best a small “from twitter” somewhere.I’m all for attention attrition!
I’m in the “Ban links, Allow screenshots” camp but with some further thoughts.
@ShareMySims@lemmy.dbzer0.com compared xitter to turdth social and I think that’s excellent precedent to draw further attention to. The reason to block xitter isn’t (just) that Musk is a mask off nazi, but that any “information” sourced from that site must be treated as suspect. Little things such as the “like” count on posts we know are manipulated already, so the notion that a post is viral or popular on xitter (and thus worthy of drawing attention off-site to it) should be scrutinized. It’s not social media, it’s a propaganda engine.
That said, even with the EU (finally) fleeing the hell site and hopefully many users and (with their pressure, eventually, perhaps) some american companies and government departments… even with that, there’s some big names and funny people that post there and if someone wants to bring over a screenshot, I don’t think that should be disallowed. Particularly since the POTUS and his cronies frequently air their vile thoughts there.
Likewise, I’m not totally against non-top-level links (so source links only in comments or post body) that are through some front-end, proxy, archive, or other means of preventing impressions from reaching the actual site. I think it’s overly dogmatic to outright ban all connections to the xitter. Sometimes a plumber needs to know where to look when they’re researching a problem.
Edit: On an unrelated note…
I’m very excited to see this kind of community discussion and vote occurring. Feels like a pretty solid consensus on this issue, but I’m looking forward to seeing this process play out for other decisions. I just moved to dbzer0 about a month ago and a big reason was to connect more with a like-minded community online. I’ve missed the golden age of the internet forum–and apparently I’ve also missed the golden age of the actual town forum as well!–so I find this whole “virtual anarchic democracy in action” quite thrilling!
Another reason for banning Twitter links: If you aren’t logged in, you can’t actually see the discussion, so the link is useless and basically spam advertising to get a Twitter account. I’ve always been really annoyed seeing Twitter links for this reason and the fact that the platform is garbage in general. Duplicating the content in a screenshot or some other way is a way better option.
Yes, as someone without a xitter account, the links are completely useless. Screenshots are stupid, but I can at least see them.
I’m all in on banning links, even if they go through an alternate front end. Engagement is engagement.
Let’s keep the screenshots but encourage more Mastodon and Fediverse. BlueSky is good, imo, for now but how long until Jack wants those sweet Nazi dollars?
Im voting yes just because I dont want my feed clogged by twitter reposts
I think banning those links makes sense, at this point that site just doesn’t get along with the general spirit of this community. No strong opinion on whether to allow proxy links or images but maybe that’s okay for people that just desperately need to reference that site for whatever reason.
In the grand scheme never really understood why people share those links to begin with, many of us don’t have nor want an account on that site so it’s not like we can follow those links anyway. No loss on my end.
Aye, in favor of banning links and stopping them from getting the traffic. I agree screenshots should be allowed.
Also providing support for 2/3 majority for changes.
I’m gonna state it now. I’m going to try to be more active in this community and make it home. I left the R site long ago, and I have to say I really like how this is going.
@div0@lemmy.dbzer0.com feel free to tap me if you think I can be useful for any of the work you have planned.
The bot surely won’t ask you for help 😅
To answer your volunteering, are you you any good with js and frontends? I’m still looking for someone who can help us onboard the instance flairs onto the frontend itself
I messed up the tagging, but looks like it still got your attention. Sent dm with a little more info.
-
