There have been a lot of requests for new comms lately and not even a discussion of actually implementing any of them that I've seen. That isn't really fun or welcoming to new people. It makes the site feel static and unevolving.
Yes, we already have a fair number of comms and a pretty small userbase, but the default setting is to browse All, so splitting up posting across more comms shouldn't reduce the pool of posts, and having more specific communities if anything should inspire more posting. Anything that has repeat issues with self-moderating can be locked or deleted, but I don't really see the issue with letting people go wild on this. The freedom to create your own little space, niche specialty community, or novelty gag community inspires a lot of creative posting in my experience and could bring in new users as well. We may not want to lifeboat any big subreddits, but letting people set up their own little spaces can't hurt too much, right?
Let new comms live and die by people's actual usage of them, rather than not letting any exist in the first place. If we have posts on this comm getting 15+ upbears, that is enough posters to get a small community going, no? let alone other posts getting 30-50 upbears, often with well known community members volunteering to moderate and still no response. And those are just the people posting and upbearing despite most of us knowing full well new comms basically never get approved. The current system just isn't working, IMO.
Admins, if there is something I'm missing here that makes this an intractable problem I'm open to hearing it. If that is the case, can we set objective criteria for creating a comm rather than defaulting to "admins ignored your post: denied"?
Everyone else: do you have any thoughts on this? I think it could work. Obviously if comms cause issues they can just be nuked. I'm fine with aggressive moderation, but as it stands now I think creativity is being stifled.
I just fail to see how they "divide" the site in any meaningful way, b.ecause the posts will still show up on the frontpage (except for users that switch to subscribed, block the comm, etc.), and I think I've laid out some potential benefits (besides just "people want them" which if there's no harm is a reason on its own)
How does it make moderating more difficult? Besides maybe by encouraging more posting, but I'm assuming that isn't what you take issue with. The people creating the comms would be responsible for moderation/creating a mod team for their sub, same as lemmy, same as reddit. And we have a team of sitemods/admins as a fallback in case they shirk those duties, who can just nuke/lock the sub if nobody will step up and moderate it effectively, again same as other sites.
another note: there have been 13 mod enforcement actions on the site in the past 24 hours. I think our 16 admins and god knows how many more comm mods can handle that load
My understanding is that the goal is to have comm mods do the vast majority of moderating, and admins will step in when mods don't deal with things in a timely manner, or when there is an urgent situation such as a wrecker or spammer. I don't know the stats on it because of the anonymized modlog, but I think it's a good goal, to have more people take ownership of their little corners of the site, and admins available for more extreme situations, sitewide rule breaking, etc. If anything it spreads the load out better. It is worth noting we no longer have the concept of "sitemods", there are just admins and comm mods. But people can mod multiple subs and I believe prior sitemods have been promoted to admin. So I don't see how it's really relevant
It isn't "another level of work" because admins already see reports from all comms if I'm not mistaken. Nothing would change except the number of comms and likely the number of comm moderators.
I would be totally in favor of putting restrictions on new comms, like account age to create a comm, and minimum number of moderators, but instead we get no new comms except very occasionally, and its entirely at admin discretion which get made. no one off meme comms, no funny randomness, no niche interest comms, etc. I'd settle for just speeding that process up and codifying the rules a bit even tbqh. it just sucks that most posts to commrequest are effectively ignored
https://hexbear.net/comment/3578494
Edit: in all seriousness I'd be fine with having main if we also had free comm creation. It'd be a worthwhile tradeoff to me. I still don't think main is good but I can just ignore it and move on
Remove main and we will continue to post everything in !chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
feel free to be lazy, I'll still read the posts, I just don't think the site design should endorse it.
That really isn't my point though, I'm advocating a different system, not just doing the current process sooner. The problem isn't "nothing ever gets approved" it's that sillier and more niche things collectively still add value to the site, and that the whole process of getting a comm added is unnecessarily long and demoralizing, and feels arbitrary, when most other sites using lemmy are just open to comm creation.
Even if we don't open it up wide open, can't we have some kind of more standardized, expedited process to get a new comm opened? For example the process could be something like: make a post in commrequest with the proposed sub name, any additional rules, and a list of moderators. people tagged in the moderators list chime in in the comments saying "yes I'll mod this comm" or "no wtf you didn't ask me about this", and within a couple days the admins review the request, make sure there are enough moderators (say a minimum of 2 or 3), make sure the proposed content is allowed/appropriate, and then create it. There's still room for admin discretion there, but it is a faster yes or no answer, and much more standardized, so it doesn't arbitrary
Rather than having "moderator of some random comm" be treated like a highly important and trusted position, it could be more proportional to the size of the comm. Or even if the mod process is kept entirely intact, just formalizing and speeding up the approvals process (and IMO, being less strict about comms that may have some overlap), would make the whole process much less frustrating and get more comms approved.
basically I'm of the opinion that allowing more people to become mods of more smaller comms encourages people to take some ownership over their posting, and become power users and makes the site richer for everyone.
Edit: it's also unfortunate that commrequest isn't in the default subscribed list. Many users may not even see proposed new comms. Idk how many people browse by subscribed tbf
like, why can we have https://hexbear.net/c/chapotraphouse3 right away, but c/mycology needs to hurry up and wait? I'm all for having both, but it seems pretty arbitrary.
I know we have particularly nasty wreckers at times, and that now may be a pretty quiet time, but the entire site has had 13 mod enforcement actions in the past day. Unless new comms somehow bring in tons of new users overnight I think we can handle the moderation load.
Aye that sounds like a big improvement, and tho I still feel like open creation could be cool, there are plenty of other places for that.
exactly! Sometimes you want a dedicated space for things, even if it's not rational, it's cool to have the ability to open up a comm and just see one type of thing. Oh I just want to see fuzzy animals rn? c/cute. I want to post about big burgeoning ocean liners or whatever: c/ships. I want to post about conspiracies: c/conspiracy or c/trueanon
Those have all been requested and ignored
C/technology isn’t the right place for azure lane posts anyway.
I also feel like it’s a good way to bring in new folks but if not it’s cool
I mean yeah, it isn't like "this is the last straw I'm taking a stand against the tyrannical admins". Far from it.
But I don't think there's actually as many reasons not to allow it as you might think. reddit has managed on this system just fine for quite a while and lemmy is too
Feel like shit just want to migrate my dog's subreddit without having to host my own instance.
I requested to open a comm and mod it but it didn't work out because I needed a Matrix account
I couldn't figure out how to DM the person I needed to DM because I don't use Matrix and it's not exactly a UX friendly software for non tech enthusiasts
Modding feels unnecessarily complicated, why do I need an account on an unrelated app to mod something here?
I think that was so they could ask vetting questions. Honestly the questions shouldn't be that sensitive that they can't be held over DMs, unless you've doxed yourself on a prior account or something. If you understand the risks (DMs aren't encrypted), you could probably bug the admins to do it on here. But it is good to have another channel of communication if there are site issues... idk
Agreed that the whole process is overcomplex for a simple comm mod position
Another thought: I think it would give power posters more incentive to post if they moderated their own communities for their interest(s). It gives a sense of ownership that inspires further posting!
