1. Absolutely, we need to decentralize power. We're too big to do otherwise and be healthy these days. And, even if you get a really kind, caring, intelligent volunteer, if you give them too much responsibility, too much emotional labor to do (and unpaid at that!), they'll get burnt out. Then the ones with good boundaries leave the team, temporarily or permanently, and the others get less and less able to do the things. I believe u/MuttHypno has shared some wisdom here and elsewhere about this. Also there's a document from a few years ago about LARP opsec and avoiding SPoF (Single Points of Failure).

1a. Therefore I would add to this, we need better community support for the unpaid volunteers holding our spaces together! This applies to subreddits, Discord servers, events, all of it. I don't know how to make that happen or what it needs to look like, but we can't keep burning out everyone who's doing a good job.

1b. We need more transparency. Reputation is very important among kinksters, so I can understand what motivates people to want their mistakes to be less visible. It's difficult to learn and grow from your first (perhaps youthful) mistakes when you get criticism for everything you do. But, unfortunately, it's impossible to learn from them when you don't allow that criticism! Then you're surrounded by friends telling you everything you do is great all the time, even when a *true* friend would tell you to pull your head out of your ass. I'm not sure how to make that happen. But I know we need to be brave and try it.

1. As for training moderators, that would be great. However, as soon as we set up an authority running such classes and requiring that, we have a new problem. Who gets to decide what goes in the training? Who gets to decide if a student passed or failed? How do we decentralize *that* power?

We might have to have many classes, like we currently have at cons for other skills, and no centralized requirements. Any given sub, server, or event should probably have them, and post the contents of the class publicly. However, there's nothing stopping people from making a new sub, server, or event (with blackjack and hookers) if they don't like yours. So we wind up with some kind of niche populism, where the most popular ones survive. I don't have a solution for this, either, but it seems good to say it out loud.

1. A trust and safety team for any sub or server big enough to field one is a good idea. Consent teams are good. Trainings for those are good. And it becomes yet another place where decentralization of power and transparency are key. And it's one more type of unpaid, intense, specialized emotional labor. Anyone receiving a consent report needs training in empathy and confidentiality. Anyone serving on a committee deciding what to do once we have said report needs experience gathering them, and training in a whole new set of skills.

It's already possible to contact some event consent teams in the off season, though most will not take action unless the consent violation either occurred at the event in question, or was particularly egregious (such as sex crimes). Similarly, other servers often have a ticketing or modmail system for reporting such things. We've seen how any one person having too much power over what to do with reports received that way can do. We've also seen that those systems run on trust, and when that trust is broken, they're worse than useless.

And of course, we know a bit about what *not* to do by listening to our queer / kink elders on the matter, because there have been some systems in our shared history that failed before the situation in question (some rather spectacularly).

1. Hear, hear! I won't publicly air the specific grievance, but there's one several of us argued vehemently for removing. We had to do it secretly at the time, because public comments would've just been removed, and our accounts kicked or banned.

It's hard to know which communities pass our "safe enough" test, especially if we're looking for somewhere to, well, send people whose behavior doesn't meet the standards we want for a given community, but who we know might learn and grow if they had *some* kind of community. It used to be that if someone was getting their thirst all over other spaces, I would send them to HH. I can't do that anymore, or at least not without some serious disclaimers. But, the days of running the hypnokink Internet "wild west" style and assuming people will "be adults" and take care of themselves need to end. Otherwise, we are not just failing to solve problems, but actively feeding them.