Current implementation seems to focus on administrative domains for control, like email servers with individual policies and reputations. What if we look at this the other way?
People have different value systems. Are you ok with promotion for monetary gain? (No never / only individual contributors promoting themselves / only small businesses and below / yes) Are you annoyed by $controversial_topic? Do you dislike when bored people make a conversation game out of someone else’s need for obscure technical help?
The details can be decided later by people smarter than me. The point, though, is that these value systems aren’t universal. Users should decide their own.
Meta interactions (up down report friend block) should be aligned to these values. My client would gather meta-mod data as well as votes/comments. I could easily configure my client to hide things, or group similar distractions together and show/hide them all together. Your client could work differently.
I have no idea how we would possibly implement this with federation. Civically minded users create a meta-moderation identity with a PGP key, sign and publish their decisions, and let people choose to trust them based on past behavior?
Probably still flawed, susceptible to karma farming and cashing out. If well known mods start betraying their users, the bad activities are signed and can be used as proof they can no longer be trusted, though it could take days to get people to stop trusting someone.
Even the whole value system idea can be subverted. Dog whistles, toxic in-jokes, things which are offensive in context but seem fine judged later out of context, etc.
But I want this for us all. (And I vaguely remember seeing something similar on slashdot in the 90s) I have no idea if Lemmy can even support it though.
I grew up poor, and reached adulthood at the tail end of the BBS days / start of the internet revolution. It was frustrating seeing so much history go by and not being able to take part in it.
Started playing with Linux early because, I think, I resented my parents never signing the permission form to let me get a school UNIX account. They thought I’d rack up thousands in long distance charges somehow. But I got Slackware 3.1 later as an adult.
I guess I wanted a taste of that “whee I’m a sysop too!” experience because in 2000 I stood up a personal domain and started making shell accounts for people on IRC. Part of my username dot net, though there’s nothing really there now. I was a bad sysadmin, though generous with my time and resources. Eventually it started feeling like a crushing weight of unresolved commitments, as the server needed more and more work that I didn’t know how to do.
The site eventually died in 2015 I think, ancient IDE hard drive finally clicked itself to death. Even more depressing. And then in the process of trying to recover the drive with Spinrite I straight up lost the drive. I think I didn’t label it well and it disappeared into a box with other IDE drives.
I found the drive again recently. I’ve been a professional C# developer since 2012 and since 2016 I’ve been with an awesome company and gotten to see a bunch of the ops side. That’s inspired me to try to get back into it, but with modern standards and security. And three ESXi servers.
Just last night I mostly finished loading my old passwd, shadow, and groups info into openldap. Got 400+ users, though I’m sure most were just ftp users who grabbed some fansub anime and split. Had 98 distinct file owners in /home/httpd/html, mostly web comics or personal file dumps. 15-ish phpbb boards. I’d love to get that all back online.
I know that won’t bring the 2000s back. Several of my users have probably passed away. Nobody will care about most of this. But it’ll feel like I’m closing out an older chapter of my life in a better way, if I get everything back online.
(And if I need to job hunt again, I can point to the site and say “behold my awesome devops skills! I can accomplish in months what a competent person can do in days!”)