I can provide some context from Greece.

First of all, the unemployment rate is high. The official figure is currently at 12.5% but has been steadily decreasing from its peak of 27.7% in 2013. The real numbers are probably higher since people that haven’t been employed within the last few years are not accounted.

As a result, labour rights are non-existent, overtime is rarely paid, wages have been stagnant since 2008, it is really common to work in unsafe conditions, and worker abuse occurs so often noone bats an eye.

While we do have unions more often than not they are powerless. For example, last year we had a major train accident (57 people died), the goverment blamed the train workers, their response was pretty much “our strikes for the safety issues that lead to the accident were deemed illegal, while our attempts to raise the issues were dismissed by the ministry of transportation”.

We have had major nationwide protests with more than a million of people taking to the streets, but noone feels like that ever lead to anywhere.

IMO one of the greatest problems is the lack of information. Mainstream media are corrupt, and independent media are sabotaged or persecuted by the government. People do not know their rights, we have been trying to survive for so long that we cannot imagine a better future, and that allows employers to freely profit from laborers.

One interesting development is that lately more collectives are popping here and there, from coffee shops to softwafe development houses, more and more people are fed up and try to take matters on their own hands (even if in absolute numbers they are still very few).

IMO it’s not about what metric is used, but how it is used. The current approach, completely avoiding any karma like mechanism, solves the farming issue, but IMO does not cater to the needs of every user.

For example, I have ADHD and if accumulating karma gives me much needed motivation and feel good chemicals, I am going to take them.

At the same time, holding a user to a higher regard because of their karma is stupid, it’s better to build real connections with usernames you recognise through continuous communication.

Personally, karma was an easily digestable piece of information about how my outreach into the social media is performing. Accumulating karma helps me feel connected with the community, feel accepted.

For context, I am the top donor at my instance, I recognize that there is a need for funds. BUT, I believe it’s important for the fediverse to be accessible to everyone regardless if they have the funds for that.

Dopamine received, initiating hyperfocus protocol!

As a rule of thumb, we’ve observed that a team of 5 trained moderators appears to provide ample coverage and redundancy for servers of about 1,000 active users

That’s a fascinating bit of information. I would expect 5 moderators to provide coverage for more users. I am wondering how they came up with that statistic (will update the comment if I find an answer).

Remember that offliine/IRL community management experience can be just as important as online experience

Interesting idea, wondering what’s the IRL presence of the fediverse…

If you’re building toward participatory or democratic governance, consider establishing a proposal and voting system (some teams we spoke with use Loomio, but multiple options exist) for major policy decisions.

That’s soooo important, I love when communities create polls to decide on policy changes.

Avoid promoting brand-new members unless you already have a pre-existing relationship with them

I have followed some discussion on multi-level hierarchies on the fediverse, wondering if there are any instance implementing that…

Consider charging for accounts or offering paid memberships.

Hell no!

We hope there will be more resources available in the future, particularly tooling around legal compliance. This is one of the big infrastructural gaps we point out in our main report

That’s a big issue, I would be interested in hosting an instance available to other people, but I don’t want to end up in jail and I lack the resources to make sure that won’t happen…

That was an interesting read, it seems there is an in-depth analysis of the report here.

Can someone ELI5 so I can get enough dopamine to go read the whole thing?

Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not but I found this review.

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/14/5/858

I had done some research about a year ago, but I don’t have the papers saved.

If you are worried about duplicates, aka a single bot spamming multiple votes, then that’s feasible to mitigate.

If you are worried about multiple bots spamming one vote each, that’s harder to mitigate and it comes down to how the instances handles bot accounts in general. IMO it’s best to ignore the bot problem and instead focus on designing a vote weighting system that favors similar instances.

For anyone interested, there are a few papers on cryptographically secure voting, where both voter anonymity and election integrity are preserved.

Most designs consider three separate entities, where if you accumulate the information between those entities you would be able to identify a voter and his vote, but each entity on itself does not hold enough information.

Follow people from other instances, if you find them interesting, chances are they will find you interesting and follow back.

Use tags, especially popular ones.