Is there 'etiquette' for choosing which instance your migrated subreddit is hosted on?

This question may be moot but it’s something I’ve been thinking about. I’ve only recently jumped into this brave new world so you’ll have to forgive my ignorance.

I’m wondering if there’s any etiquette or conventions for which instance a ‘migrated’ subreddit should be hosted on. More specifically, I’m thinking about the communities where the subject matter is more regional.

For example, if I use an account on a UK-based instance because that’s local to me then it might not be optimal to create a community on the UK instance if the subject matter is US-centric. Would that ultimately lead to a worse experience for the majority of those community members that are based in North America?

The difference in speed for me connecting to something in the UK vs the US is basically negligible, but it’s non-zero and potentially exacerbated for those that have slower or unstable internet connections. This may be particularly true while rapidly-expanding instances are a bit unstable anyway.

It’s obviously up to the mods of each subreddit to decide what to do for their “official” migration. However, what I’m afraid of happening is:

  1. A migrated subreddit is hosted on an instance which has a detrimental effect on the experience of a significant number of its users.
  2. To combat this, former Reddit communities get splintered into multiple, region-based communities.

The latter wouldn’t be so bad but one of the things that made Reddit so appealing to me was the differences in perspective from all walks of life that sparked discussion. That sense of being part of a diverse, active community might be lost if the overall Reddit migration is handled in a haphazardly way.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Am I worrying about a non-issue?

Is it time to crack each other’s heads open and feast on the goo inside?

EnglishMobster , (edited )
@EnglishMobster@kbin.social avatar

So I'm on the /r/Disneyland mod team and we decided to move here to @Disneyland / !Disneyland during the blackout. We're still directing users here in the subreddit's sidebar, although the mod team collectively decided to reopen the sub on Reddit after the admins started threatening mods directly.

There were a couple options floated when we were considering the move:

  • Make our own instance. Traditional forums like MiceChat have survived for decades; we'd effectively be a fediverse version of MiceChat. The main subject would be Disney, but we'd have Disneyland communities, WDW communities, Marvel communities, Star Wars communities, etc. This was shot down because we didn't have the funding, time, manpower, or legal expertise to host things ourselves at any kind of scale. All us mods have day jobs and we don't want to take on a full-time admin role; other Disney subs likewise didn't seem terribly excited about joining in. Shout-out to /r/startrek for starting https://startrek.website and /r/Android for https://lemdro.id/, but it wasn't in the cards for us.
  • Join a Lemmy server. This was before Lemmy.world existed, so our options were limited. We basically had Lemmy.ml, Beehaw.org, or sh.itjust.works. We disagree with the admins of Lemmy.ml on a fundamental level; Beehaw doesn't allow new communities; sh.itjust.works was maybe doable but we didn't want to deal with that URL for a Disney-themed community. Waiting for a new general-purpose instance to appear (what Lemmy.world became) just wasn't in the cards since I wanted it to be open during the blackout.
  • Join kbin.social. At the time, there were no other Kbin instances - fedia.io didn't exist yet. But Kbin seemed very flexible (direct Mastodon integration is a plus!), the admin team was just Ernest (but he had a good head on his shoulders), it was my personal fediverse site of choice, and it was growing quickly. At the time we made the call, federation didn't work as expected but it was promised to be fixed (and it has been; we now federate rather broadly).

We've gotten some organic activity on the Disneyland magazine over here on Kbin, which is nice because it shows we don't need to keep the community on life support. The big downside to Kbin (and Lemmy!) is that mod tools basically don't exist; it's going to be tricky without AutoMod long-term. Once Kbin has an API it should be trivial to remake AutoMod for Kbin though, assuming the API has moderation actions.

PriorProject ,

There’s a lot of factors to consider, enough factors that there’s no consensus on how you make this choice and at the end of the day you have to pick one and run with it.

A random list of some factors you could potentially consider before yolo’ing:

  • Is the admin team good? Are they power-tripping jerks? Are they ideologues who are likely to defederate the world for no sensible reason? Do they have a good head for policy? There’s no easy way to evaluate this, you have to look at the sidebar to see who the admins are, stalk their posts a bit, read the modlog for banned users (but he aware that moderation decisions are federated and anonymous so it can be hard to tell what mod did what), and you yourself have to be good enough at these things to recognize quality (or at least alignment with your own values).
  • Is the instance well-funded and is the admin team prepared to deal with the serious stuff like child-porn reports and subpoenas? Again, this is hard to check for. Basically, if an instance has been pretty big for years (there are only like 2 or 3 Lemmy instances like this and they’re all overloaded) or has the admin team run some other big service before?
  • Are the instance rules compatible with your topic? Don’t run a porn sub in an instance that bans porn. There are vibe concerns as well, like an edgelord meme community is not going to do well on a hyper-moderated safe-space-oriented instance.
  • Is the community topic geographically based? You might want to pick an instance homed in that geography. This can be eval’ed by using ip-lookup tools of the instance doesn’t advertise its geography.
  • Is the instance homed in a jurisdiction that has favorable laws for your topic? It’s better to host a community for sex-work or bourbon on an instance in a jurisdiction where those things are legal, rather than in the UAE.
  • Is there a topic instance that specializes in your topic? There’s a pathfinder TTRPG instance and a star trek instance, is there one for your topic? Note that topic-based instances can fail some other and more important criteria like being an experienced admin team. It’s possible that a topic instance is NOT the right choice, but it’s worth considering.
  • Is the server overloaded already? Mebbe pick a different one.
  • Is there already a well run community on another instance? Help that one grow, don’t splinter the community further.

There are many more factors to consider, and no one considers them all. Eventually you have to pick an instance that’s “good enough” and run with it. But those are some of the major factors one could consider if you’re willing to put in the non-trivial amount of effort required to evaluate them.

HaunchesTV OP ,

There’s a lot here I’d not considered so this is helpful, thanks.

The splintering is an issue I’ve run into already. When I searched for squaredcircle on the assumption the subreddit community had started moving, I got results for five ‘squaredcircle’ communities across five different instances and none of them have a significant membership. I don’t want to further splinter the community by creating another community as you say, so I figured I’d just have to subscribe to all of them and wait to see which one takes off. I guess it’s going to be down to the subreddit mods to say “this is where we’re going”, if that’s even what they want to do. Until then it might be a bit daunting for those making the jump but it is what it is.

PriorProject ,

The splintering is an issue I’ve run into already. When I searched for squaredcircle on the assumption the subreddit community had started moving, I got results for five ‘squaredcircle’ communities across five different instances and none of them have a significant membership.

Yeah, I blame Lemmy’s fairly terrible cross-instance community discovery and just being young. Reddit had overlapping communities as well (tons of DnD subreddits, tons of aiti subreddits, and there were plenty of high-profile community split events over mod policies). But because it was so well established in recent years… most communities had standardized on one well-run subreddit.

But Lemmy’s community search is so poor, I think folks legit fail to find bigger/better off-instance communities and so no single one gets a toe-hold to gain critical-mass… they all just kind of smoulder with catching fire. Hopefully better community discovery will come and the well-run communities start to rise to the top.

RheingoldRiver ,

Were you a subreddit mod? In this case my advice would be to contact the existing mods of the lemmy communities / kbin magazines and see if one of them is willing to hand the community over to you (add you as mod, they step down). If so, you've found your new home!

(you may want to re-make your account on the instance that you're primarily spending time on, for convenience, in case federation doesn't work for several hours at a time here and there, etc)

Crankpork ,

At the same time as keeping an eye out for "power tripping jerks" you want to watch for poorly moderated instances as well. Instances with little to no moderation are at risk of being defederated by other instances if they can't stop their users from trolling/harrassing/evading bans/blocks, etc. You don't want to set yourself up on what seems like a big instance only to have it disconnected from the rest of them because bad actors decided it was a safe haven for acting up.

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