White guy mod's white guy buddy has arrived to mansplain me how the instance (and its sister instance) work and came to be.

It's funny cuz I was personally recruited very early on to help build the original (because of the exact type of thinking I'm sharing in this thread). I was part of the community level discussions that lead up to spinning up the sister instance.

This means that a single good/reasonable outcome is totally possible from using a long-term harmful value.

But that one good outcome doesn't mean that carrying that value forward will always result in good outcomes. The value can do more harm than good in the long term.

So that's why I say I'd be willing to accept the current choices (limiting but not defederating with threads, ignoring a majority poll) if those choices had been presented to me with different reasons/values as justification.

Community maintenance is about making good/reasonable choices for good/reasonable reasons. Whether a choice is good/reasonable can depend on which reasons are used to justify it.

This is more about the long term than it is any one moment in time: our reasons for choices reflect what we are valuing for/about/in a community.

And they show what standards and values we are carrying forward to use in future choices.

By which I mean: without a clearly articulated standard or threshold about how *much* of a majority is necessary, any majority decision can be rejected by anyone who has access to power and prefers a different outcome.

There's always an argument to be made that the majority is wrong, especially when we disagree with the majority (or if the majority wants something that creates onerous work).

But it's only power overreach if it comes from the poweur-overreacheux region of France. ;)

I also think it's interesting that I've got a moderator telling me "but that poll wasn't a decisive indicator to defederate".

Which, again, sure, okay. I entirely agree that simple majority-rule isn't the ethic we are looking for as a society.

And. I'd feel a lot more interested in *that* argument being mobilized at *this* time if there were a pre-existing standard for "what is a meaningful majority". Otherwise the whole thing amounts to governance by sparkling confirmation bias.

I understand that there are reasons not to defederate from everything, and that good organizing has to work outside of ideal spaces.

If that had been the argument presented, I think I'd be okay with it. Sort of.

I object to the choice made for the reasons shared, especially because of the poll indicating most people who weighed in did not like this choice either (reasons unclear in poll)

I re-read it.

The choice rests on eliding "big instance" mod issues with "corporate instance" participation issues, and then goes into "we want to boost small voices".

That's...pretty much what I thought it was.

A poll even favored joining FediPact, and apparently the leadership team decided not to do that.

Welp.

https://newsletters.projectmushroom.xyz/federating-with-threads/

Everyone is tired.

I have to assume this, because I am so so so so so tired.

And everyone is entitled to their own parsing of ethical issues.

At this point in my life, I prefer the approach of "I don't think this principle is sufficiently valid to dictate action X" over "ah but the real injustice is NOT entering a slippery slope zone".

I'll re read PM's explanation, but I can't identify a philosophical way to harmonize this moderation choice with PM's original principles.

I know lines are hard to hold.

I realize that community well-being rests on heavy boundary labor, and that for PM and spore, I do not do that work (I subscribe, but it's not the same).

And at the same time, do we hold these principles to be valid, or do we not.

Because if we do, this "too big to fail" approach to letting in corporate-run social communities is a cop-out. And if we do not, the original claim to principle was, what...convenience based?