I haven't finished reading https://fediverse-governance.github.io/ (it's 40000 words okay?) but I've been thinking about how instances are run and how rare it is to have democratic mechanisms for deciding who your moderators are

but then again, is it that surprising when "voting with your feet" is so easy? maybe the decision to join and continue using a server is implicitly a vote in favor of that server's moderators, and migrating to a new server is a vote against them

obviously it's not really that simple; I've been moving away from my old account at icosahedron.website not because I think the moderators have done a bad job (they've done a great job) but because I think the developers of Mastodon itself haven't done a great job at prioritizing user safety and moderation tooling but instead seem to want to play catch-up with twitter/facebook

in cases of larger servers or those with strong cohesive local-timeline communities it would be better to have more direct democracy practiced, but maybe the migration-as-a-vote is why the lack of such democracy hasn't been catastrophic

one thing that keeps coming back is the importance of the moderator/user ratio

I'm wondering; does mastodon default to open registrations? does it have a mechanism for saying "allow registrations, but only until it hits X number of signups" or "allow registrations, but only so long as the moderator/user ratio is above Y"?

seems like simple things that could help a lot, but also simple things that are not very closely aligned with the growth-at-all-costs vision of mastodon gmbh lately

@technomancy Glad to sort of side-step a lot of these issues by a) not being popular and b) running my own instance. Kind of wish I had started out w/gotosocial instead of pleroma/akkoma since it fits my preferences better, but figuring out how to retain my social graph while doing so is more work than I’m willing to put in.

@alpha yeah I ran my own pleroma for a while but always kinda considered it a temporary thing; if I had moved over to it as my primary it would have made the move to gts a lot more complicated

I kinda like having a main on gts and an alt left around on masto as a backup fwiw

@technomancy puts me in mind of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity_(Catholicism)

@hiredman huh, I hadn't heard that term before but I like it