Gaming, news, tech, general literature. All of these are somewhat thriving, with a steady influx of posts and comments. At the same time, the userbase is sorely lacking for more niche communities. In my case it’d be stuff like poetry, yoga, religion, linguistics, meditation. Or many other communities I’d doubt they’d form a larger userbase here, at least to the degree that it’d foster good discussions. Communities where there are a larger amount of “normal people”, that are not tech-aware, and who have no interest in migrating off centralized corporate solutions. That just want a large space to discuss what they’re interested in.
This for me at least, makes it hard to completely leave reddit (or even Facebook and their groups!). Do you think the fediverse will ever reach the point where this would become a non-issue?
I’ve always felt like there should be some way to moderate communities without having “moderator” be a defined role for certain group members. Perhaps several different ways, that groups can experiment with. I’ve got several ideas, but no real moderating or programming experience, so take everything I say as just layperson spitballing.
Moderation of a community/magazine/subreddit can be partially broken down into several different tasks. These include responding to reports, reading modmail, enforcing rules, and changing rules. The way in which communities achieve these tasks varies, depending on the culture of said community, the software they are using, and individual choices of moderators. Those last two are especially important, subreddits are particularly prone to individual bad actors due to the way they are governed. Communities/magazines seem similar. To avoid these issues we need more, varied ways of accomplishing the tasks of moderation.
There are so many options. We could use direct democracy to set community rules, with either the majority votes everyone is used to, or consensus, to ensure no one is left out. There should be great nuance in how these systems are implemented. For example, maybe rules changes are proposed using a specific type of post, people engage in it to discuss the idea, why it is needed, and potential ways to implement it. If there is enough positive community involvement (maybe 10% percentage of active users and no unresolved issues in the comments) the post is pinned, those with notifications on are notified, and everyone gets encouraged to weigh in. Every step of this could be modified, the way activity is determined, decision time, if there is a prior state for formulating the rule, and more should all vary by community.
Reports could be dealt with through a semi-automated way, users get prompted to help moderate, and if accepted get a few reports to respond to. Their response is aggregated with several other people’s, and if they match the decision goes through. If there is disagreement, the report is elevated and shown to everyone, or only those who want to moderate, or just the small mod team. Depends on the community. Point is, there are lots of ways we could be running our communities online, and the Fediverse may be the best chance ever to try them out.
There will be struggles implementing these sorts of policies, large communities will have to deal with bots mucking up consensus, people will have to adjust their expectations, and we will inevitably just plain disagree sometimes. Hopefully in working together on this we could offer something that corporate social media truly cannot, I know I’ll at least be trying to post once in a while, and keep on making walls of text only tangentially related to their parent post (like this).