I would use Discourse Policies in a different manner and drop the current Community Values policy. In a separate topic I have outlined my thinking, including a proposal that involves positioning SocialHub in a new direction within the fediverse ecosystem, in order to regain its relevancy and value to the open commons.
So, if anyone doesn’t agree with this particular wording, of this particular “community values policy”, they are a “fascist”? And you’re struggling to see why I think this is authoritarian?
I’m not sure you understand what a fascist is. I suggest you read this:
I also note that it’s a common tactic of historical and contemporary fascists, including Stalin and Putin, to denounce people as fascists.
Please @strypey, stop speculating and state your issues with the current policy clearly in a way that we can have a constructive discussion. You saw what happened with Twitter and Meta. So, please stop sneaking around. If you’re a white supremacist, which I doubt, you are not welcome here. If people want a SocialHub where people can get harassed, they can do their own. If the SocialHub is to become a welcoming place for Nazis and corporate fiends, you must find a way to host it yourself: petites singularités will not endorse it.
How comes you’ve gone silent @strypey? Is it that difficult to answer suddenly?
@how, yes. I quote your statement undermentioned:
I cannot imagine speaking in the accusatory manner that you have (to another person) merely because that person has equated your partisan phrasal (which you desire that all participating here affirm, lest they be restricted from all participation otherwise) with that of fascists who conducted themselves similarly.
It should have demonstrated to you that assumptions might not be the most applicable course of action, yet you repeated this mistake.
I’ve no particular problem with your (plural, for the author(s)?) specification of undesirable behaviours and political affiliations, but that’s orthogranol to this specific discussion of whether its enforcement measures, as you’ve aforedescribed, would be reasonably considered to be authoritarian.
I don’t think it’s a very useful discussion regardless, though. In fact, I say that if a policy exists, it should be enforced. Otherwise, the problems with the policy shall never be understood, and the policy shall not improve. An example is the undermentioned criticism, which I agree with in its entirety:
Though, on that note, I have a suggestion regarding your proposal. In it, you state that accounts which disagree with it shall be terminated:
I estimate that this refers to permanent deletion of their account. Instead, I suggest that like those who merely have not (yet) agreed, their accounts should merely be suspended unless they decide to agree.
There’s no reason to prevent them changing their mind later. In fact, I find that convincing people to change their mind is easier when you provide easy avenues to do so. Removing all of their account’s activity would be a way to ensure that that is impossible, which would be a shame.
Does that mean that this is done by instance moderators, instead of users? I presume that the ignore function still works on remote users in its stead?
Thank you for chiming in @RokeJulianLockhart, and welcome to the SocialHub. It’s kinda reassuring that new people actually read this topic!
But I think you’ve missed a number of steps in this community, and are conflated a few things, so please let me clarify as I can.
This policy was discussed between a handful of people who were early adopters here, including someone from the ActivityPub specification authors. We all agreed that this policy should complement the W3C CEPC felt too neutral for an informal community, especially with regard to welcoming and protecting vulnerable communities, and specifically in the historical context of the Fediverse breaking out from oppressive mainstream platform. We did not know yet that Twatter nor Mata would become what they are, nor that the fascists would take over countries like they do, but we were aware of existing harassment issues online, across mainstream social media, and also aware of the history of colonialism. So after a few days (or weeks, can’t remember, won’t lookup) of lively discussion, one person came up with this proposal, and we adopted it.
Now, three years later, 215 people agreed to it and 342 did not take a stand one way or another. Among these 342 people, many simply came here, read a few things, posted a couple of replies, and went away: there’s no easy way to figure this out. Discourse is suspending unused accounts after a period of time to prevent malicious use, but some people do not even remember that they have an account here.
I think we agree on this. But then, you quote @kaniini who objected and there was a resolution to this discussion, that you omit entirely. @kaniini disagreed with the policy, and did not participate any more (and since more than three years), while keeping their account here.
The next quote you take is out of context, and is orthogonal to this discussion. It only brings confusion. Here is a detailed take that I hope clears that confusion:
About remote flags
When someone in the community stumbles upon a problematic post, they can flag it. If their standing in the community is good enough, their flag is automatically accepted; when it comes to remote users, I’m asking the plugin developer to confirm my belief that the Reject button in the ActivityPub plugin Actor’s page is doing the same. And yes, this last part concerns people with access to those Actors – for now it’s admins I think, but that may change as the plugin develops and has not much to do with our community policies here.
I think you misread: I used “suspended” and “termination”. I proposed that “those who merely have not (yet) agreed” (to use your words) have their accounts suspended until they reach out to the team to either accept or refuse the policy. So my proposal and your proposal are the same, aren’t they?
I think that someone who refuses this policy is ready to harass other people, and we do not want this here. I’m still wondering what people do not understand, since those who argue fail to clarify what in the policy is problematic for them.
If anyone wants to chime in, please state why you cannot agree with this policy, or when do you think this proposal to suspend undecided accounts should be enforced. And @strypey I would appreciate to read your opinion.
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Thanks, @how. Overall, I agree, except for the undermentioned:
You shouldn’t assume such a thing. You might consider it a logical estimation instead, but there’s a lot more nuance. Luckily, it doesn’t impact the enforcement action, eh?
Well, what would be a reason not to accept this policy from a logical point of view?
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@how, I have referenced it already:
However, I believe you consider it to be refuted:
I don’t understand why @kaniini not being active anymore is a counterpoint to what they stated. If anything, it demonstrates incredibly well that its content may be correct, because it was evidently important enough to prevent them participating.
I think both @how and @RokeJulianLockhart make some very good arguments. The word nuance is where I sit firmly with my thinking. I have given follow-up on the related thread, since it matches that topic best (on topic here I do not think we need front-door policy enforcement, and it isn’t workable in this federated hub).
See Wellbeing, participation, processes and policies - #5 by aschrijver
The refutation is way earlier… You can read the whole development in Policy Proposal: SocialHub Community Values. It was a long and hard discussion.
And the conclusions are here:
So you see, even I did not remember that @kaniini finally agreed. We did not enforce the policy without consensus. I think most people who are chiming in hereafter are oblivious of this prior process and careful deliberation.
Now, I think that sometimes during February I will come up with an SQL query to be able to:
- identify users who refused the policy and warn them that their accounts will be terminated, giving them a change to expose their situation;
- identify undecided users and warn them their accounts will be suspended, giving them a chance to accept or refuse the policy;
- automate account termination when you refuse the policy. This last points may be a bit harder to setup, we’ll see.
Of course, someone else may figure out the right SQL queries. 
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Looking back at the 2021 discussion it seems that once revisions were made to address the concerns, basically clarifying that the draconian interpreation wasn’t intended, @kaniini was fine with the revised text.
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Thank you for the confirmation @jdp23
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Like a lot of people, I’m trying to have a holiday before getting back into work for the new calendar year. Can we please park this discussion for a month, to give people time to get back to their desks and catch up with the discussions?
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For the record, subsequent events lead me to withdraw this recommendation. I’m now convinced that SocialHub has fallen into a classic “tyranny of structurelessness”. Two possible paths out are;
- SH community sets up formal governance, where people with admin and mod powers are subject to fair and clearly signposted conflict resolution processes, to make sure they’re accountable to the community, as well as vice-versa.
- Decentralising SH using forum federation, and some thoughtful UX design work (which is needed anyway and I’m keen to help), so there is no SPoF to be torpedoed by things like admins going AWOL, or falling into petty empire-building.
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IMO both are necessary. For one, I think I have done my job here, and would like the community to take over. So it would require that we (petites singularités) pass on the infrastructure to some formal body that we can ensure will be fostering the trend impulsed so far and not diverge away from it too much. It would then require that at least three system administrators are active on this service (we’re two, but in practice, I’m alone), and that there are more moderators as well.
I’ve been trying to handle this responsibility for a while, without much success. Now there’s a deadline: the activitypub.eu domain that hosts this community’s email service expires on September 10, 2025. I do not intend to renew it unless there is a solid ongoing plan for the community for taking over this infrastructure, including financially. Our non-profit has been paying for everything (hosting, domain, and work) since 2019 without a single external contribution (except in kind, by a number of people here).
So, either way the change is coming. I’d rather have it come in a structured way.
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Like @how I have dedicated enough time and energy commons janitoring and “weaving in public” for the SocialHub dev community in a role of community facilitator for 5 years. While this is often frustrating, largely unseen and unthankful work, I did it with pleasure, and gained a ton of experience, valuable skills and insights about the social dynamics of grassroots communities, technology ecosystems and tech advocacy in general.
My focus has since become the overarching requirements to uphold sustainable and healthy grassroots environments that are able to evolve and grow. Tackling major fediverse challenges and sustaining a healthy commons based standardization process for the ActivityPub family of technologies require dealing with the social aspects of our chaotic fediverse movement.
For anyone taking over community organization of this dev portal the offer to become affiliated with Social coding commons remains open. It is a means to tap into the value that is being created by working in commons with other commons participants, who are all also independent initiatives that have shared interests wrt the future of the social web.
(I am available for inquiries on the fediverse at @smallcircles@social.coop, on Social coding forum as @aschrijver, and as @circlebuilder:matrix.org on Matrix chat.)
Update: Also see my toot on the matter calling for people to step up..
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(Moved to dedicated topic: SocialHub developer community: Reboot or Shutdown?)
This is a completely unwarranted assumption. It’s obviously wrong, due to the fact (pointed out previously, twice) that none of the active contributors who haven’t agree to the policy (myself included) have harassed anyone here. So it’s hard to see this as a good faith argument.
The policy was not drafted through an open process, in consultation with the members of the forum. It was imposed on us as a fait accompli, and we were expected to accept it, or negotiate amendments. This is how parliamentarians do things, not technical standards communities (and certainly not how anarchists do things).
Since this policy has no legitimacy, nobody is under any obligation to agree with it. We’ve all read it, since the relentless notifications gave us no choice. So we know what the political biases of the people in control of this Discourse instance are, and we take that into account. If you had been willing to leave it at that, so would I. But here we are.
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The original proposal was made at the end of January 2021 following the “alt-tech exodus”, and a moderation issue involving an alt-right user, that triggered a discussion among admins to make a statement. On January 31st, 2021, I made a proposal to keep the trolls away in a private conference where 7 people were involved, following the alt-right threat:
Three days later, we decided on proposing:
And the rest is documented at the link on top of this topic in the staff notice: Policy Proposal: SocialHub Community Values. This discussion took fifteen days and concluded on the agreement of people who emitted concerns, with the integration of suggested changes and clarification of the scope of the policy.
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