this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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Fedigrow
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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
- https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federate your community to a lot of instances
- [email protected] to organize overall fediverse growth
- [email protected] to keep tabs on where new users might come from :)
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Megathreads:
- How (and when) to consolidate communities? (A guide)
- Where to request inactive or unmoderated communities? (A list)
Rules:
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So, you want to give your userbase creative freedom, without allowing it to attack itself or marginalised groups. Is this right? Here's what I'd suggest:
This rule alone would shoo 90% of the potential bigots, who'd likely cry about "muh freeze peaches", but still allow people to have bigotry in their fanfics.
If there's something that bigots love to do, it's to pick on some loose end of a discussion, then pull and pull it until the discussion gravitates around their pet issue; this rule would make short work of this tactic. It's also useful to improve general quality of the discussions.
Some people actually like to RP their OCs; to each their own, I guess? Either way, if you let people RP all over the instance/forum/site some might use it to say "ackshyually I was RPing" to attack other members.
Don't feel afraid to change the rules as you go. You'll get a thousand problems that nobody could predict, it's fine to address them. As long as you do it transparently, it's fine.
A few additional points:
Keep a close watch on users who gravitate around certain specific topics. Most of them should be OK, but some might be looking for trouble. Look specially for signs of sealioning.
Recruit mods with good reading comprehension and who are OK reading huge walls of text. You'll need it for subtleties like distinguishing "the MC is racist and this is shown as a character flaw" versus "the MC is racist because the user is self-inserting".
Social media is full of a certain type of user full of "good intentions", who points fingers at other users based on weak reasons (such as poor reading, assumptions, etc.); for example, if you say "Hitler was shit but this has nothing to do with him eating bread!", they'll pick on that "but" and claim that you're a Nazi. Well, I call those "witch hunters". Don't let witch hunters in your community - they make people feel insecure to approach certain topics, and they indirectly help the ones whom they allegedly fight against.
I also feel like your idea leans more towards an old style forum than a Lemmy instance. So perhaps NodeBB is a better choice in your case.
I am pretty much thinking NodeBB will be my go to for the actual software. Because you are right, this is more like an old school forum, and that's how I handled things before everyone decided to just sterilize the Internet.
I don't necessarily agree with requiring certain things to be portrayed as being a negative, but that's a creative disagreement really. I kinda feel it would be more powerful a read if someone had to hear that and see a character not account for those things. If only as a warning for how easily it is to let the road to Hell be paved with your Good Intentions.
The fall to Darkness isn't something someone goes through seeing how it's a bad thing after all.
I definitely will need good Mods and another Admin. I definitely need to have people willing to bounce not just blatant bad people but those same witch hunters that seem to infect everywhere these days.
Witch Hunts always do more harm than good. And being part of one group or another shouldn't excuse Harrassment or other bad behavior.
It seems that your idea is fairly solid already on what to do, then. That's great!
It helps that while the subject matter is different, the basic setup should theoretically be the same as Fanfiction.
Forums focused on Topics, Moderation based on Actions taken and not just ideas, and keep the bad faith actors in check as much as possible. Genuinely bad people and Witch Hunters both.
The only difference from my old Fanfiction days compared to this is I don't think I will build a general archive page to support it. I will probably encourage people to build their own sites to publish their content.