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.
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looks like there is a decent amount of support for c/mycology
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.
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