Website League update for February
Howdy, folks. It’s time once again for the Website League update; our work continues. Most of what we’ve accomplished in the time since the last update has been related to governance; so far, we are making good progress toward our goal of building a functional, stable, and friendly social media platform. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been working on:
The Community Code
The biggest user-facing accomplishment is that the League Community Code, our unified ruleset, has been finished and implemented. We agreed that Cohost’s Community Guidelines were a good basis for a moderation ruleset, if we stick to them well, and we based the code off that. Katja drafted the Community Code with a process of continuous feedback and iteration; our goal is to make things as clear as possible for users and moderators, and eliminate ambiguity wherever we’re able. To this end, the Community Code is accompanied by an Interpretation Code based on RFC 2119. This lays out definitions of terms and the principles to be used in interpreting the Community Code, should a situation requiring it arise.
With a ruleset designed specifically for the purpose of unified moderation of a federated system, we hope that this ensures that all our moderators and users are on the same page. If you’re interested in seeing the official proposals for these documents on Consensus, they’re available here for the Community Code and here for the Interpretation Code.
The Steward Code of Conduct
During December, we experienced a conflict in governance with regards to how we respond to and handle outside criticism. After the involved Stewards had time to cool off and discuss the events, we concluded that it would be in our project's and our users' best interest to adopt a Steward Code of Conduct, a document binding all Stewards, to ensure that Stewards are working with a shared and formalized standard of professionalism and behavior in their duties as Stewards. Our goal here is to make sure we behave in a way befitting the trust placed in us by the community, and reduce our risks of experiencing internal strife.
The SCoC is derived from the Contributor Covenant, which we adapted to fit our purpose. Conflict is inevitable in any cooperating group composed of people with heterogeneous viewpoints; our intent is not to suppress it, but to ensure we work out our disagreements in a fashion that minimizes the risk of members of our governance ending up hurt or under stress because of their work in the League. If you’re interested in reading the Consensus proposal for the SCoC, you can find it here.
Keyholder responsibilities
We have also formalized the responsibilities and requirements for people holding the keys to League internal infrastructure: Coordination, Consensus, Planning, domain names, accounts on third-party services, and so on. This means we have a shared understanding of the expectations, duties, and processes for people maintaining League infrastructure, replacing the ad-hoc (and undocumented) processes we created during the initial rush to get things off the ground. The proposal vote for this is here.
Inactive Stewards
A significant number of people signed up to be a part of governance in the early days of the League, before we implemented a nomination process. The result of this was that the membership of the Stewards was 42 individuals at its peak.
Some of these folks found they weren’t as interested in helping run things after they were built, that real-life responsibilities precluded them spending much time on this, or that Stewardship wasn’t their thing for a variety of other reasons. Some former Stewards have stepped down, and some other folks simply became inactive. With the quorum requirements of our consensus system, a significant number of non-voting members risks gridlock; to that end, we’ve implemented a periodic check-in for Stewards.
Any Steward who doesn’t respond (or voluntarily marks themselves inactive) is excluded from the count of Stewards for purposes of determining the quorum necessary for votes to pass; they can return at any time. This helps ensure we keep things running smoothly, and that people don’t feel obligated to choose between resignation and doing something they lack the time or energy for. In addition to ensuring we can actually act while working within our own rules, it’s an important step in our goal of ensuring the people running the League don’t risk burning out on it.
Technical work
Work continues here, as well. There are upcoming upstream changes in GoToSocial and Akkoma we will be merging into our forks. GoToSocial has implemented post editing, and the next release will include centralized allowlist management. We are also examining the possibility of allowlist management using Akkoma’s Message Rewrite Facility, .
Concluding
Since the adoption of the Steward Code of Conduct, and with the adoption of the League Community Code, we have ensured we have a shared understanding of our responsibilities as League stewards, as node moderators, and as users. Things have been ticking along largely uneventfully since then; as long as our users are happy, and as long as we’re doing our work well, uneventful is good. As we head into the new year, we will continue our work toward building a safe and inclusive place for people to hang out online.