This is inspired by this advice from a few months ago:
Stop giving shitty mods a free pass. Honest mistakes happen; but if the mod in question is assumptive, disingenuous, trigger-happy, or eager to enable certain shitty types of user, spread the word about their comm being poorly moderated. And don’t interact directly with the comm. I think that at least here in the Fediverse we should demand higher standards from our mods.
(Emphasis mine.)
In the past I have used places like [email protected] or [email protected] to call out mods on other subs, with mid-to-almost-high degrees of success, but I wonder if it would be better to have a dedicated sublemmy?
Here are my thoughts on what would make this effective:
- probably shouldn’t be hosted on .world due to the breadth of possible conflicts of interest with admins
- probably shouldn’t be hosted on .ml due to federation hurdles
- mods of the community shouldn’t moderate any other communities of any significant size, in order to make the whole “accountability” thing work
- mods should be willing and able to deal with substantial quantities of garbage posts because there would be a lot of “why won’t c/xyz let me be transphobic/say slurs 😡😡” type submissions which, left unaddressed, would outflood genuine criticism
This is still in conceptual form so I am interested what others think :)
The last time I encountered a power trip mod, I created another community on the same topic, brought other people who were unsatisfied over, and the new community is much more active than the initial one.
It takes quite a while though.
Yeah, I suppose my idea of a decentralized accountability sublemmy would just help make that process a little more efficient.
Obviously it’s still rough and a mess but I think it’s a fair enough decentralized fit-in for Reddit’s centralized moderation authority.