@chikara Thank you for a nice and relevant post. The process is ongoing, we haven't reached conclusions yet.

There were many goopd posts and points made, we had people participating from different instances even. The question of controlling undesirable actions and content being add to any particular instance or service is important.

The voting on the open survey you mentioned had very small number of votes, and even those were not restricted to local, verified users. So I wouldn't take it as a mandate for a certain direction.

Qoto is in a way VERY unusual - in having this kind of discussion out in the open, on a public feed, that is spread out across the whole Fediverse and the Federation too.

(yes, there's TWO biggies, I have learned recently)

I have been participating in many networks actively for many years, starting from the pre-Internet days. And this kind of discussion was held "In Camara", on meetings for site staff, or on a physical meet at some public space in case of a local entity.

While we had that and another related big discussion (the instance's thematic focus and the surging unrelated, general posting by new users).

That is equally important, and also was done in the open.

Meanwhile, posting continued as usual, but I think we are making progress.

Leadership is important in all kinds of aspects in life. Here as well, there's space for anyone who is caring and willing to pitch in.

@chikara I should point out, the vote was non binding. Especially because non-QOTO members can vote on it.

Only votes conducted on our discourse server would be official, and we havent dont anything like that other than the elections.

With that said, me and the other moderators, nor the community, have reached a solution yet.

@chikara @freemo I am coming late to this discussion, and I mention what follows with fear and trepidation. I'm curious whether this kind of system has been considered.

I have occasionally admired the results of Slashdot's moderation and metamoderation system even though I certainly heard participants complain about it. I never created an account there and always read anonymously, but I did find the quality of the comments that percolated to the top was generally fairly good even when the site was far more active than it is now.

I don't mean this to be flippant. You guys are talking in terms of peer review. For all its numerous faults, peer review has high ideals. Let experts judge noteworthy work. The Slashdot moderation system is hardly all that.

I am also unsure how exactly a moderation and metamoderation system would translate into the context of a Mastodon instance.

Nevertheless, from the perspective of an outside observer Slashdot did seem to select a fairly reliable set of moderators from a large crowd of mostly anonymous individuals some of whom were openly pushing specific agendas. And with the metamoderation system they took it a step further to answer the question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

As I understood it the system tended to select moderators that were long-time readers who did not have a history of negatively-rated comments. That was basically the standard of "expertise" required of a moderator, although there were some instructions to encourage moderating based on how the comment contributed to the discussion, not whether the moderator agreed with it or not.

In any case, I suspect QOTO has attracted a specific kind of participant because of the way it describes itself and the tools it makes available. It would certainly be a shame to see that drowned out in the noise as it grows.

All that said: growing pain is the best kind of pain there is! Congratulations.