This is why when a social media site gets past a certain size, the admin team and the moderation need to be clearly defined, and siloed from each other's core responsibilities, so the admin team focuses on running the site and the mod team focuses on making it sing.
Looks like the people actually moderating clearly had a handle on the situation. The admin was clearly overworked and didn't agree with the direction the community was taking, and made a quick decision that was poorly thought out.
The reason admins are admins is because they're good at running machines. You can turn a machine off if it's broken, and change how it runs with the flip of a switch.
A community requires a much different approach, and never, no matter how wise the decision, reacts well to being told how to act. It takes a different skill set to properly moderate and run a community than it does to run a server - in fact most admins I know make notoriously bad moderators (myself included, although I'm no longer an admin).
To be honest, the admin here is acting exactly like your stereotypical libertarian tech-bro computer guy who pays lip service to the left while pocketing the more palatable pieces of the philosophy of the right. I've worked with a lot of them in tech. LGBTQ+ is hard stretch for these guys in general - they'll declare gays have rights but won't march in Pride, use slurs when in like company, and generally see LGBTQ+ as a lifestyle choice and not an inescapable biological state of being.
They don't understand that it's not a switch you can flick on and off.
Just glad I'm on the Fediverse where this particular admin's meltdown doesn't matter too much, but I have a feeling Squabblr's fate is going to be the same as Voat (which was cool for about two weeks before the alt-right overran it).
Reddit’s product is the ad sell on their site. People visit the site because of the user generated content. If you’re interacting with other users on Reddit, you’re still contributing to the company’s income.
I’m assuming they don’t charge advertisers for blocked ads, but you never know.
If you recall reddits growth many of their communities evolved as offshoots of a single generic community. This made it easier for people to see discussions they normally would not get involved in, and once the posts in a similar category reached critical mass it moved to a sub Reddit....
What beehaw has done with limiting the creation of communities has worked well, since the ones they created have been pretty active.
Not all instances need to be that strict, but might be good to have a place to propose a community, why they’d be a good mod, and type of initial content they plan to post themselves before it grows would help until the user base is bigger to be able to sustain random free for all creation of communities. Some places just exist with nothing posted at all, so you’re not sure if even the person who created abandoned it from the get go.
Why do I suspect that, even if one were to spend 8 hours a day on Reddit, making comments that all were gilded, you'd still earn less than minimum wage?
"Site I only still care about to laugh at thinks I am going to give it my tax information." I'll have to think real hard about that one.
Investors should themselves have a good think about how the CEO that self-reported making zero profit in over a decade as one of the most popular social media sites — a site whose ad revenue has stuttered in the face of what is officially a month long protest — can afford to be handing out money to shitposting bot farms now.
When the whole Reddit fiasco started happening, I saw a lot of people wiping and deleting their Reddit accounts and moving elsewhere, like here on Lemmy....
I didn't delete anything, because there's quite a bit of programming & tech advice. I always knew reddit was profiting off my contribution, everybody should have known that from the beginning.
I'll stop contributing, but I don't like how much useful information has gone dark or otherwise suddenly just been lost. I wouldn't burn a library down because they started charging exorbitant late fees, I would just stop going there.
I don't think many people understand that if they use Lemmy or kbin, they are posting to the fediverse. There are other platforms and will be more to come. Referring to a post on "Lemmy" or "kbin" is like saying you saw a post on your Windows or Mac computer....
While you're correct, it's just a clunky term. I think some other way to refer to the whole thing will probably come along soon, and in a few years, people will regard saying fediverse the same way we look back on people talking about "surfing the information superhighway" or whatever.
There were numerous factors that led to the revolution, but a key one was unfair taxation. The British parliament was in a position of power and thought that they could behave with impunity for further profits....
This is the second time I've seen something on kbin trying to dress the reddit migration to the Fediverse up as some hugely patriotic thing.
We don't need that, we don't benefit from it. This is how you create demagogues. Don't infuse nationalism into the Fediverse. That is super problematic and I think you're going to be in for a rude awakening when you see how much more European the Fediverse is than reddit was.
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....
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.
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.
Squabbles, another recent reddit alternative, seems to be taking the doomed "free speech" path ( i.imgur.com )
Reddit refugee with a question
Hello all,...
I think the rush to recreate communities is a bad idea. ( kbin.social )
If you recall reddits growth many of their communities evolved as offshoots of a single generic community. This made it easier for people to see discussions they normally would not get involved in, and once the posts in a similar category reached critical mass it moved to a sub Reddit....
Reddit's Contributor Program could earn you real money for your Reddit karma ( www.androidauthority.com )
Reddit could be working on a Contributor program, letting top contributors earn real-world money from the gold and karma they receive.
18+ Reddit banned me for 7 days no reason ( kbin.social )
im currently migrated here if you wondering why i got banned here is context:...
Does anyone regret deleting their Reddit account?
When the whole Reddit fiasco started happening, I saw a lot of people wiping and deleting their Reddit accounts and moving elsewhere, like here on Lemmy....
It is not Lemmy or kbin, it is the fediverse. ( kbin.social )
I don't think many people understand that if they use Lemmy or kbin, they are posting to the fediverse. There are other platforms and will be more to come. Referring to a post on "Lemmy" or "kbin" is like saying you saw a post on your Windows or Mac computer....
This July 4th, let's remember that unfair economic treatment was a major cause of the American Revolutionary War. Our revolt has this much in common. ( kbin.social )
There were numerous factors that led to the revolution, but a key one was unfair taxation. The British parliament was in a position of power and thought that they could behave with impunity for further profits....
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....
People in /r/redditalternatives are talking about a "Reddit 2.0" What website would fill that role? ( kbin.social )
On Reddit at reddit.com/r/redditalternatives, people are talking about a "Reddit 2.0." What do you suggest?