I haven’t used Discourse, but what you describe sounds like the way that Slashdot has been doing moderation since the late 90s, by randomly selecting users with positive karma to perform a limited number of moderation actions, including meta-moderation where users can rate other moderation decisions.

I always thought that this was the ideal way to do moderation to avoid the powermod problem that reddit and lemmy have, although I acknowledge the other comments here about neglecting minorities being a result of random sampling of the userbase, but it is likely that this also happens with self-selected moderation teams.

Within minority communities though, a plurality of members of that community will belong to that minority and so moderating their own community should result in fair selections. Another way to mitigate the exclusion of minorities might be to use a weighted sortition process, where users declare their minority statuses, and the selection method attempts to weight selections to boost representation of minority users.

A larger problem would be that people wanting to have strong influence on community moderation could create sock-puppet accounts to increase their chance of selection. This already happens with up/downvotes no doubt, but for moderation perhaps the incentive is even higher to cheat in this way.

I think a successful system based on this idea at least needs some strong backend support for detecting sock-puppetry, and this is going to be a constant cat and mouse game that requires intrusive fingerprinting of the user’s browser and behaviour, and this type of tracking probably isn’t welcome in the fediverse which limits the tools available to try to track bad actors. It is also difficult in an open source project to keep these systems secret so that bad actors cannot find ways to work around them.

Create an account to read the full story.

lmao not a chance

slop

Switching your firefox profile to a firefox fork is super easy peasy squeezy cheesy peas.

You just need to follow the steps for moving your profile in this Firefox support article: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles

When you start librewolf or whatever you switch to (librewolf is what I use) it will have everything from Firefox including whatever your last session was (if you save your session) and all of your history and bookmarks and even addons and UI customization etc.

Population expansion is exponential but the tram moves at constant velocity, so by the time it reaches the end of the track of 8bn people there will be an exponentially increasing number of people further down the track.

The bottom one will kill an infinite amount of people in finite time.

instantaneously FTFY

I checked your Mastodon timeline but I don’t see the post, only the one where you relate the story.

Yes the volunteer software authors should work to the beat of the drum of the baying and braying users who insist on using cutting edge software before its wider ecosystem has adapted to its novelties. A very good point.

It really is a shame that they force you to update to the new version. If only there was some way to continue using the existing Gnome version until the extensions have been updated by their authors.

better luck next time

Slightly off-topic for this post but would it be possible to get a metadata field in the instance picker for the country that the instance is hosted in?

Some of the instances say this in the text blurb, but many don’t mention it, and it’s something that is becoming increasingly important for people with all the new social media laws coming in in various countries.

Thanks.

https://mastodon.social/@Liberux/114773833271790172

We’ll relaunch crowdfunding with a functional prototype. We’re also in talks with investors who respect our values.

This is almost certainly deliberate and a result of the theregister’s sense of humour.

Umbrella vendor says the sky is falling.

nice meme

It’s the bloody Sycamore Gap Tree all over again! When will this madness end!?

https://unvanquished.net/

it seems to be a Natural Selection clone which is great because RTS/FPS is a fun and under-represented genre

It’s like CORBA but for Typescript.

XChat

I read one of his novels, I mean blog posts, once. It was so long I had to get a screen reader to read it to me like a podcast because I just didn’t have the time to scroll through that wall of text.

I was nodding along the whole way. Yeah yeah it was all stuff I agree with. But there was not a single original thought in that ~1 hour of screen-read text (at 150% speed no less). I felt like I had wasted my time bothering to read this novel, I mean blog post.

If you are a choir that wants to be preached to, and you want to hear someone with a name that other people recognise play the greatest hits of your anti-AI sentiment then it’s great. Otherwise, you’re really not missing anything by ignoring every single thing posted here under his name. You get the exact same rhetoric from the memes posted to this community and every other.

Instead I would recommend pluralistic blog (Cory Doctorow) who actually has original thoughts on the industry, the economy, and what activists can do to help their communities.