Yesterday me and Blaze had a bit of a back and forth and upon review I had some thoughts.
Let me state first and foremost, I adore Blaze and his contributions to the threadiverse. I think he makes the threadiverse a better place with his presence alone.
That said, when we were arguing I had a few problems. But the biggest and most pertinent was that I felt he was chasing Redditors.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I chose Lemmy. Since I got here, I have put my fair share into making this place everything I want it to be. Whether that’s conducting myself properly or whether it’s trying to engage or provide a platform for engagement.
One thing I really don’t want Lemmy to be is Reddit. I engage on here far more than I ever did on Reddit. I have a perfectly curated timeline which is the perfect mix of news, entertainment, enlightenment and conversation. I want Lemmy to remain Lemmy.
Lemmy works for me and my mental health. The way Lemmy is set-up, I relish the fact that I can discuss popular topics away from the general populus. In general, I have zero interest in participating in the biggest communities with, what is inevitably the bottom of the barrel posters. So for my peace of mind, I stick to strongly moderated instances and away from the catch-all communities.
That’s not to say those communities don’t have their place. They do! In fact they have a special place in my heart because they filter the bad actors away from me.
And ultimately that’s what makes Lemmy beautiful. That there’s different instances, different crowds and different discussions.
One thing that Blaze said yesterday was that, “people from Reddit say it’s a ghost town.” and I said that doesn’t matter. He felt that we need to rectify that to ensure growth, but at what cost? Becoming Reddit? I don’t want to be Reddit. Even at the software level, Lemmy has tried hard to not be Reddit, hence no karma.
I don’t want Lemmy to sell its soul to attract the very people I don’t want to be around. I’m not saying there’s not room to grow or improve, I’m just saying we have to grow and improve while holding on to our values and having some integrity about it.
That’s what I’m doing with mine, and holy crap is it a chore. Like, my mental health is in the gutter just trying to keep a vibe here that’s “general” while not over-modding the place to a desert. I am looking for secondary/backup admins, so if that’s the kind of environment you want to help foster, hit me up.
I do strongly feel like we need to chase some outside demographics. Things are getting a bit stale here, and we need some new blood and less, uh, passionate viewpoints.
Cases in point that I feel are detrimental to the success of the Fediverse:
Half or more of the demographic here being armchair activists for every-freaking-thing. It might be less than half (probably so), but they’re so loud and persistent, it drowns out everything else.
The absolutists who see the world only in black and white and paint things with a brush the size of Australia. The lack of nuance in opinions here is staggering. Everything is “all or nothing, perfect or bust, good is the arch enemy of perfect, etc” here, and that is simply not how the world works.
The people who’s only response to literally anything in the news being “Guillotines! Luigi! Violence violence violence!”
The people who are clearly only here because they’ve been banned and/or are otherwise too toxic to be platformed anywhere else. Like you said, I’m here because I want to be here, I want to be part of something better, and not because I was banned or otherwise asked to leave any other platform. Two years in, I cannot say this place is “better” just differently bad.
The people who think they can say anything they want here because it’s not “corpo social media”, so anything goes.
The revolving door of trolls owing to the platform’s distributed nature. It’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, and yes, I mix my metaphors.
Given all that ☝️ and more that I didn’t call out specifically, we definitely need to attract some new blood here, at least to thin out the above; we need people engaging on topics other than whatever hot-button issue is flooding the front page.
This article is about Bluesky, and say what you will about Mark Cuban, but he’s not wrong in this and it also applies fully to Lemmy/Piefed/et al. The amount of dog-piling that any comment that even remotely goes against the groupthink here is insane; even the slightest disagreement to an absolutist statement gets brigaded to hell and back with accusations of “bootlicker” thrown around like that’s some kind of universal checkmate move.
That’s not engagement, and it’s certainly not healthy.
My interest in this platform has been steadily declining because it’s the same old rage/soapboxes/knee-jerk reactions. I can’t imagine trying to get new people to come here right now let alone stick around. I try to post non-political, non-hot-button stuff as often as time allows, and I know others do too, but I dunno. Seems there’s too many people here who just want to rage and virtue signal and not enough who actually want to just…be people.
Thank you for this. The thread and subsequent insight is invaluable. I’m getting the feeling that it’s the niche/topic-specific instances that have the easiest and subsequently beat time.
Seems so, yeah. Just wish that was what I was going for myself :/
But why don’t you lean into the West Virginia thing in the same way that lemmy.ca does the Canadian thing?
Honest answer? It’s too depressing. I’ve been considering a full re-brand for a while now just haven’t gotten around to it.
Do you know why it took me so long to reply to you? Because I wanted to give your effort what it deserves. You come across as a great person, but at the same time there’s that red flag where you say your interest in waining.
General purpose instances are an inordinate amount of work, but that’s what you want and you literally have the instance that makes it feasible. When Lemmy.ca started it was tiny, but it grew and now it’s huge. Same with feddit.uk, there’s others too.
Now here’s the thing, West Virginia to you may seem boring, but to me, it’s interesting on the merit of you and how you conduct yourself. So if there’s an instance where good people post about the general things that interest them, who wouldn’t want to see that as a success. Use that as your lighthouse.
Also get rid of Tesseract. It’s dark and feels claustrophobic. The only people that like dark websites are the people that know how to switch a website to dark mode.
Interesting. This is exactly the same thing that took down lemm.ee itself.
I personally find this the wrong approach which is why my instance doesn’t try to be “generic”. It’s specifically around my interests and my biases and of course attracted other people like me for this reason. As such, actually enjoy the vibe of the m@tes and we have plenty of people who are encouraged and enthusiastic to help maintain it. I had way more admin applications than I needed when I opened them and I’m sure I could have many more if I do it again.
I don’t think trying to run a “neutral” or “generic” instance is healthy. You’ll end up having to moderate people you disagree to your core with and that just ends up with constant admin drama. Even with our own approach of democratic decision making and me trying to shed as much responsibility from myself as possible, I still get way too many people thinking I’m a benevolent dictator who can solve their lemmy problems.
Anecdotally, I have found a similar experience modding slrpnk. It’s been (IMO) extremely low in drama, and due to the theme, the community is filled to the brim with incrediblely pleasant people who make it a joy to participate in, and often step up to moderate abandoned communities and reduce the load on us admins.
Though it probably helps that we’re still a smallish/medium sized instance, require written applications, and defederate from a small handful of instances to decrease potential conflict.
Yes, being strongly opionated at least ensures you get people joining with the same opinions which helps with cohesion.
I get what you’re saying about lemm.ee (and I share that opinion) but it’s definitely a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.
.ee was very averse to defederating opting to leave it up to the users; I have no such qualms and don’t federate with more extreme or problematic instances. That cuts the workload down considerably.
My “theme” here, such as it is, is providing a non-toxic and (relatively) safe environment by default. It’s even an official mission statement now. By “generic” I mean a good mix of content while not pigeon-holing the whole instance into a single set of topics (nothing wrong with that - look at your instance and startrek.website as great examples - but just not what I’m going for myself).
Not sure if you are in your response, but I’m also factoring in federated content as well. I’m certainly not saying that I have to agree with everything that comes in via federation, but I definitely do not feel compelled to platform everything or everyone either. At the end of the day, regardless of where it comes from, all this content is all showing up under a domain registered to me. There’s a sense of implicit responsibility and tacit endorsement for that content which is stressful to even think about. Really, the only solution to that is running an instance that doesn’t federate or federates very narrowly. That introduces FOMO to the point of “why bother?”
I dunno. There’s definitely a balance to be found, and I’ve mostly modeled mine off of Beehaw, but keeping that balance has been challenging.
Probably once the .ee evacuation settles down, and all the new alts of previously banned accounts are taken care of, things will be a bit less stressful.
Hm, what I have noticed is that a lot of “generic instances” like lemm.ee and l.w., sjw etc, end up with mostly absent admins, so it doesn’t seem like you’re the first to deal with burnout like that. And yes, it takes a quite a bit of courage to host social media for randos. I’m putting my life straight on the line especially since my instance tends to be more spicy than most. But I don’t let it stress me in advance.
Very good points.