My work on threativore and flairs was the stepping stone for something I wanted to achieve ever since reddit. A way for a community (instance in our case) to be able to vote on decisions, without having to rely on comment-votes and manual counting, but also without allowing every rando on the service to vote on your internal matters.

To this end, I have now deployed the governance community on our instance and it’s live, let’s say in testing mode. Please check the manual I just linked for more in-depth explanation of how it works.

As discussed in the previous thread, the initial plan is that only stakeholders can vote and open threads. Everyone who is supporting us with donation is a de-facto stakeholder, however threadiverse enjoyers cannot open new threads. Also after the discussion I decided to allow vouching for others, which any supporter at the higher tiers can do twice. Vouching gives voting access, so this means you can specify other people who you personally know are valid members of the instance, and that will allow them to take part in the decision making, even if they’re otherwise only lurking. Effectively vouching puts someone at the same level as a threadiverse enjoyer.

EDIT: I had a change of heart about this. I plan to initially allow both threadiverse enjoyers and vouched to also open threads. If this causes problems, we can re-evaluate.

On a voting thread, the bot will maintain a control thread and refresh the tallies every 15 mins, (so don’t expect instant updates.)

Currently most of y’all won’t have voting rights, because ko-fi tiers will only be applied at the next donation or the monthly charging time. Liberapay is handled more often, but it requires a manual step on your end which you can do on your own already.

If you have any suggestions for MVPs for our instance, please do suggest them.

Unfortunately no feedback from any UI developers until now so as to add threativore flairs to the UI itself. I guess I have to learn javascript as well one of these days…

Anyway, this is only the beggining. I want to add more voting options, more automatic ways to nominate others for MVP. And I still need to distribute the affiliation tags (they will be visible when you comment in a governance thread). Eventually I want to even allow threativore to be usable my comm mods than just instance admins.

There’s already a test thread in governance, so go ahead and downvote/upvote it. I plan to open a proper one soon, with a small decision I want to make. I wouldn’t suggest trying to open a thread yourselves yet until voting-enabling tags are distributed, as the bot will just lock it)

EDIT: I decided to extend the voting a bit further. Now votes of local instance members who otherwise have no voting rights will also be accounted at a rate of 1/100 from a random sample of up to 1000 of their votes. This means that a vote can go up to max +/- 10 from local community votes and it’s a fractional count (i.e. +1.1, or -0.7) which should make the local community sentiment an excellent tiebreaker, without overwhelming the people who are directly supporting the instance. Furthermore, I decided to display the “outsider sentiment” which is votes from non-valid-voting users from other instances. The outsider sentiment is only flavour (“Positive”, “Negative” etc) and is disregarded from the total. This is just shown for reference of the outsider sentiment which I think might be useful.