Preface
I’m writing this on the eve of Ontario’s 2025 election. I know that this is unfortunately another election that is not held under a proportional representation (PR) electoral system.
I am just an ordinary Canadian citizen – I don’t consider myself an activist, yet I can recognize an unfair and abusive system.
But now is not the time to let pessimism dissuade us from the democracy we deserve. With Duverger’s Law (i.e., in non-PR electoral systems, a trend towards a two-parties), we are running out of time to act. Canada’s 2021 effective number of parties is 2.76 - this number will decrease over time, and will eventually end Canadian democracy as we know it today.
I’m not writing this to get donation money (although here is the Fair Vote Canada donation site), but this is just the reality with live with and the future we are fighting for.
Proposed 2025 objective
to be in the top 100 most subscribed communities for lemmy.ca. Achieved on 2025-03-02.- As of writing this post (2025-02-26), !fairvote@lemmy.ca is currently 111th rank with 261 subscribers.
To be in the top 100, this would technically mean having >= 296 subscribers, but for simplicity, let’s set the goal to be >= 300 subscribers before 2026. That’s just ~40 new subscribers by the end of the year. Achieved on 2025-03-02.Where we currently are https://lemmy.ca/communities?listingType=Local&sort=TopAll&page=3, and where we want to be https://lemmy.ca/communities?listingType=Local&sort=TopAll&page=2 (or on page=1, of course). Achieved on 2025-03-02.
While I love a good, yeasty, loaf of bread 🍞, !bread@lemmy.ca has 638 subscribers, which is 144.4% more than our 261. I suppose you could say I’m jealous.
Next steps
Before the end of March 2025, please comment on whether:
- this is a good objective to have
- if it’s not a good objective, what other objectives should we pursue
- Ideas on how to achieve our objectives
Statistics
| Date | users/month | u/m % of c/Canada | mod/u/m | posts | comments | Subscribers | subscribers % of c/Canada |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-02-26 | - | - | - | - | - | 261 | - |
| 2025-03-03 | 866 | 11.994% | 23.09‱ | 205 | 629 | 323 | 3.968% |
| 2025-03-04 | 942 | 13.120% | 21.23‱ | 211 | 654 | 342 | 4.191% |
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I am so glad to see this place pop up, it has been my biggest issue in voting. Its fucked up that every vote I have ever cast has been discarded under FPTP.
The fediverse is the perfect place to encourage more people to support proportional representation. Imagine if your only choices were lemmy.ml or lemmy.world.
Your vote should count!
We’ve been growing at about ~10 new subscribers for the past week. The fair vote movement is truly alive and growing!
We will get proportional representation one day – we are deserving and entitled to representation!
But we can’t do it alone, please spread the word!
Potential Goals:
- Enforce posting standards such as language labelling on new posts (but perhaps not comments). We want to be a bilingual community, supporting both anglophones and francophones.
- At least 1 post for each official language per week.
Growth of >= 1 subscriber per day in 2025. Possibly monetary incentive, for example, if there’s +1 local subscriber -> $1 (and $0.90 for subscribers otherwise) for Fair Vote Canada. Have users/month and subscribers be at least >= 3.5% of !canada@lemmy.ca.- Diversifying supply of sources. While Fair Vote Canada is an easy choice, we should seek exposure to other movements such as the Charter Challenge for Fair Voting or Apathy is Boring.
- Self-sustaining community. Currently, it’s mostly moderators that are posting. But we are people too…
- Recruit a french moderator. We need someone to focus on that communication front as I’m still a beginner in french maintenant. I suppose a good stopgap can be to post french articles to entice interest.
Some additional restrictions on mods: must be registered on a Canadian owned and operated lemmy instance.
Yup, don’t want that situation where Dennis Pilon had to fight off 2 bad faith american lawyers trying to argue passing any proportional representation at all in Canada would be “unconstitutional”.
Hmm, an article from American owned media no less.
Yeah, it’s on the avoid list hehe.
In other good news, we are the #17th most visited community this month! We have 785 users/month.
I think these two separate objectives are good, but at the end of the day subscriber count is just a number. The real objective is having an actual representative democracy in Canada at all levels of government.
Even with 261 subs, posts from this comm can reach “all” (that’s how I found this place). That’s the way to reach people who aren’t too engaged with this topic. We just need to have a critical mass of people upvoting.
Good luck voting fellow Ontarians!!! May the 45th Parliament be proportionally representative!
Thanks for your feedback! I was unaware ‘all’ was a mean to find this fairvote community.
Overall, I agree, but in the meanwhile, we should make a conscious and concerted effort towards a goal.
A sort of sub task leading up to the goal of proportional representation.
Increasing the subscriber count helps towards that (at least in my opinion).
I can see this place with 1k subs one day!
I’m not a Canadian, y’all got this!
Thank you for your encouragement!
More countries are adopting pr!
