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Comment on How will this community survive its Eternal September?

For the most part, I’m Johnny on the spot when I get a moderation email, I’d like to think. BUT! In the common IT trope of “what happens if Ben gets hit by a bus tomorrow, who would know what to do?”, the answer is easily, let’s add another mod. It’s a fair question and I’d want to think on writing some sort of “what does being a mod here mean” type post and then ask for people who are interested. I already have a few in mind, just never actioned on it.

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vk6flab@lemmy.radio ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You might also expand that consideration to the infrastructure this instance runs on.

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- w0odl@lemmy.radio ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’ve had that thought and we’ve talked about it a bit with respect to upgrades, but honestly, it opens a larger can of worms and trust levels.
  
  There’s a lot of sensitive information that I’m already by default trusted with and finding someone that, to be honest, I can trust would be a big conversation.
  
  Also… deploying this ship is not the easiest thing in the world, even as a docker container. Documentation is like the wild west and sometimes, you have to take a best guess or know how docker deploys work or how the instance itself works.
  
  BUT you are correct. if this is going to be a long lasted instance, having other people on board would help.
  
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  - vk6flab@lemmy.radio ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Ultimately this is about risk mitigation, about what happens if. There are many different ways to tackle this. I have not found a guaranteed solution, but here are some to consider:
    
    If we keep the community size small, in other words, restrict the number of people who can join, the impact of this instance going away is limited in scope. It’s not a fun thing to contemplate, but it’s potentially a viable and effective solution.
    
    If we “appoint” moderators, there are implications of trust. Even the most trustworthy person you know might make a decision that’s not what you would have chosen. Furthermore, people make mistakes for many different reasons. Making rules around moderation is attractive, but edge-cases will always exist and “don’t be a dick” means different things to different people.
    
    The same is true for “appointing” an administrator, for the plumbing of the IT infrastructure, not the content. I have been spending a little time trying to either find or construct a “turn-key” fediverse “node” that can be instigated and run almost autonomously. This would reduce the requirements for human resources, but it would cost money.
    
    Creating a “body”, a formal agreement between “founders”, is another way to go. It does not guarantee that your efforts will be a success. Even if you write your constitution to deal with malicious intent mitigation there’s always someone who will take over and shit in the nest.
    
    We could leave well enough alone and let it crash when it does, either as a service, or as a community, as-in, it gets overtaken by unwanted content. We could stem the flow for a while, but if that’s ultimately unsuccessful, we could just shut it down.
    
    One point worth making separately is the legal aspect of this community. What happens if a member posts, willingly or not, illegal material? What happens if someone attempts to invoke the GDPR on some aspect of the ongoings here? How is that “risk” mitigated?
    
    Note that I’m not advocating one solution over another. This is more an attempt at identifying ways to mitigate any potential “risk” in whatever shape that arrives.
    
    I’ll also note that the amateur radio on-air experience is essentially ephemeral in nature. There is nothing wrong with treating this community in the same way. It has a nice symmetry to it if anything.
    
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    w0odl@lemmy.radio ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Awesome post! Since you made the original post, I’ve actually already started a github wiki to address my concerns about what it would look like going forward. To address them in line:
    
    I’ll always want this to be a selective community. But as you said, this may be more than what “I” want and that may need to change in the future.
    
    People do make mistakes. I can tell you I have already as a moderator and that’s just how things are.
    
    For adding an admin, I have started a github organization that I would want someone to join who had experience in how things work and how to mitigate errors. I can tell you… I’ve brought down the site for an hour or 2 a few times and I hope no one noticed… And with the thought of money, I’m comfortable with where we are now with how much we cost, but going forward, there’s a lot I’d like to add like better backups that I know would add cost to our instance.
    
    I think this would always be the case. What we’re almost talking about is treating this like a business where we just put the trust of this instance in people. That’s where the aforementioned backups would help (hopefully)
    
    You already have me thinking too much about not letting this fail! I think that what we are discussing isn’t an overnight thing, but maybe over the coming year(s) we could implement.
    
    There are already a lot of pull requests and issues on the lemmy github about GDPR, and it seems as though it’s something that is sorta addressed already but is a big deal that will be fully addressed in the future
    
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