I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
Thanks, its a critique I’ve been building on since 2023. Because I watched the consequences of these issues manifest in real time. And I think the same critique we would all rightfully bring to Reddit re-emerged here in lemmy, which is that this space, in-fact, all online spaces: they are something we all co-create; they are not a thing which is owned by one party, be it a company, an instnace owner, an admin, a mod, a poster, or a commenter.
The only right answer to me is also the spiritual fulfillment of the original reddit, of Lemmy and the fediverse more broadly, their deepest goal: to resinstill a sense of ownership of the communities we build together online. Reddit didn’t make reddit. We made reddit and it was stolen from us. But then we just fell into the same traps as what happened to reddit. And the answer is as clear as it ever has been, although arguably, far closer to being reached.
I’ve done some ideating of how this might work, and I’ve been thinking that a “more general” approach which could be adopted across the fedivserse for democratizing actions would be better. But it would be easier to fork lemmy and just do it there. I also met someone a while back who had implemented some different voting tools in a federated fashion (I think for polls though). It would require some thinking and design and some testing. But it would be a helluva experiment.
Fairly said.
FWIW, I’m a mostly retired coder with enough on my plate with my own projects and a fair degree of burnout, but I can read code. At a guess (unresearched) Piefed would be an easier codebase (and Python a more accessible language) to fork, but I’d probably look toward optional modules that could be added to standard Piefed at the discretion of an instance. Forking is a lot of duplicated maintenance.
At a guess (rule of thumb for developer estimates is double the number and increase the units. You could do it in 2 days means 4 weeks, it’s easy to envisage something but the implementation details multiply) the community moderation code would likely be on the order of a couple thousand lines. Given good design docs (hard) a team of three might take a month to get to a stable minimum viable implementation and it could probably be maintained solo thereafter. Highly achievable.
Getting a solid but flexible (to enable experimentation) architecture in place is key and starts with a well formulated, constrained (core features only but with examples of how it is likely to expand) explanation of the goals. Then a mockup of expected behaviour. I’d be happy to offer constructive criticism.