We have a “counsel of trusted users”, it’s the mod team who are committed to making our little democracy thrive. We don’t want to be in control, we want to facilitate the community in choosing its own direction.

The simplicity of our process works in our favor. If somebody spun up 1000 alts to mess with a vote, we would notice. All of the discussions and votes happen publicly, so anyone can audit the profiles involved if things seem weird. I’ll play whack-a-mole with bots every day if I need to, and that can also be audited on the publicly-visible modlog.

No system is perfect. This is the system we decided to try, despite the challenges that could arise from it.

Now that we have a mod team in place for The Agora, this is our next priority. We’re working on some preliminary guidelines based on previous discussions/votes that we’ll be discussing soon.

For now, just know that we share your concerns. We want everyone to feel represented here, not just a vocal minority.

Consider this another vote for Ubuntu or any of its variants. They’re beginner friendly, and established enough that you’ll find plenty of resources written specifically for them. Linux Mint is another one I’d recommend for beginners, it’s designed to “just work” out of the box and be an easy transition for Windows users.

Then it’s just down to using it some. First and foremost, leave Windows installed until you’re comfortable with whatever else you end up trying. Whether you partition, or make a bootable USB drive, or even just a VM, use some kind of temporary space for practice. The terminal is a lot less intimidating when you aren’t learning in your main environment, you can go break things and see what happens.

So far, we have a captcha on account creation now and it seems to be working (from what I’ve seen, anyway)

It’ll be a tough balancing act though. Relatively frictionless sign-up has been great for us, and anything that deals with bots will also affect that. Whatever else we may end up doing will need to be carefully considered.

I don’t even really think about it, I just comment if I have something to say. At worst, nobody reads it and I was shouting into the void for a minute.

But the Lemmy userbase isn’t massive yet, so those week+ old posts still see more engagement than you’d think.

“Sledgehammer” is definitely the word I’d use, but it is an interesting thought. The Agora seems like it’ll be plenty for the foreseeable future, but there’s a hypothetical future where we outgrow it and need something that scales better.

At a quick glance, Decidim seems like it would be a decent solution if/when we need to upgrade. Free/libre with a focus on transparency is a great start, and it looks like the tools are pretty flexible.

But as a counterpoint, there’s a lot to be said for keeping governance here as long as it’s sustainable. Removing as much friction as possible from voting means more people will participate, and it doesn’t get much easier for voters than dropping an “aye” or “nay” comment on a ballot post.

You can buy some at the grocery store, it says “Moon Cheese” right on the damn bag! They wouldn’t just lie about what they’re selling

If you want impressive, you have 4-6 seperate terminal windows that take up the whole screen collectively. The laymen assume you’re hacking the NSA or something if they see that.

Counterpoint: being able to drink a cup of coffee then immediately take a nap leads to the most restful 20 minutes of sleep you’ll ever have.

Sure I’d rather be affected normally by caffeine, but at least it isn’t a total wash.

Multiple lists. Short-term, medium-term, long-term, “maybe eventually”. If one of them starts to feel like too much, I can kick some things down to the next one.

They’re also kinda based on how much focus will be needed to complete things, not just how important or time-sensitive things are. The medium/long lists are mostly stuff for “good brain days”.

It’s quite a rabbithole. My “favorite” is the fearmongering around reactor waste products. People resist nuclear because we “need to store the waste”, even though we can reprocess it back into fissable fuel. But also we “can’t” do that, because that process can potentially be hijacked to produce nuclear materiel.

Both are valid concerns, but it shouldn’t be an impossible problem to solve. Especially these days, knowing how destructive some of our other common fuel sources are.

I love my old Saddleback bifold. It was pricy, but it’s still in great shape 10+ years later. It’s also a bit bulky, but that’s by design to keep them durable.