Hey there lemmings!
It’s your friendly neighbourhood Sun-Spider here. I recently volunteered as a mod on this community, so I just wanted to introduce myself and let you know my plans.
Many of you will have seen that there are a lot of off-topic posts in this community right now. I suspect that new users, especially ones not yet familiar with how Lemmy and the fediverse work, are seeing it as a kind of default community or a place to generally discuss the world of Lemmy.
However, as it says in the sidebar, this is a community about the lemmy.world instance specifically. If it’s going to serve as that, then it can’t be drowned in off-topic posts.
To that end, I plan to start going through and removing posts that are not discussing this instance, with two exceptions.
Firstly, I know that some of these posts are providing good info to new users coming from Reddit, so I’d like to not take those down just yet. Since this is such a visible community, keeping them has value. Therefore highly upvoted posts that are specifically for newcomers from Reddit may get left.
Secondly, I know that removing posts with many upvotes and comments could be seen as overly harsh. While we don’t have a karma system here, if you had a post that has done well then suddenly seeing it removed is painful. Therefore if a post is off topic, but is nonetheless highly upvoted, then I may instead simply lock the post. This preserves the content, but prevents further engagement. This should mean that it gradually falls off the front page, whose default sort is Active.
TLDR
- Posts that are not about the lemmy.world instance specifically will be removed, with the following exceptions:
- Some posts providing value to new users will be left
- Some posts with high engagement may be simply locked
Update
Check out the new communities !newcomers@lemmy.world and !general@lemmy.world! These are intended to be a good home for a lot of the content that’s getting removed/locked.
Can we hold off on this for a bit while things settle? I personally posted a story about investor concerns over Reddit’s blackout here because of the high visibility and because beehaw.org was blocking instances. Lo and behold they have blocked us so I guess it was a good call even though their Tech community would have been a better fit. I could have also made a new community here I suppose, but again, there’s no eyes on that.
Isn’t lemmy.world literally like 15 days old? Let’s not be too quick to turn this into a Discord server with 50 channels and 10 users. There’s nothing wrong with piling everything in one place when there’s barely any content to speak of anyways.
EDIT: I just created a new community to repost these locked posts in order of most comments:
Welcome to Lemmy.World General! This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse, discuss topics & ask questions that don’t seem to fit in any other community.
For server-specific announcements & questions, please see Lemmyworld, and if you’re really new to all this, check out the Newcomers community, but anything else? That’s what General’s for!
Hello.
Thanks for making this post and letting us know with transparency what’s going on your mind and with this community. :)
I do have a question with you being a moderator: @SpezCanLigmaBalls@lemmy.world posted here regarding communities with abandoned moderation. I’m starting to encounter that as well. This comment mentioned reaching out to the mods, and I’d hate to do that when that isn’t the path forward.
Can you write a guideline for mods in this instance so that we know how to resolve issues going forward? This will help with this instance maturing as we go. :) Maybe a mod only community where we can communicate with the instance owners/mods?
Why can’t we just let the users decide what gets visibility vs what doesn’t?
I know it may be a stupid question. The problem with Reddit was it become to moderated to the point if you didn’t read the fine print your post would get removed.
I think users simply agree what is relevant to the community and what isn’t and will vote accordingly.
If the content is obviously NSFW take it down, and if they are spamming obviously ban them and remove the spam.
I really would hate to Lemmy become overmoderated.
