Summarizing some thoughts about handling lifeboat communities that came out of the comments in the pinned thread about What Is To Be Done about c/DankLeft:

  • Some users pointed out that it would be nice to get a slow trickle of traffic from subreddits intending to use us as a lifeboat comm in advance of their ban, rather than getting a flood of new users that are, on average, more liberal than your average hexbear.

  • One of the admins brought up the r/DankLeft mod's concern about the lifeboat c/DankLeft comm getting taken over with our culture here, but that they didn't want to have to moderate the comm here until the sub is gone.

  • When we were banned since we didn't have as much time to prepare, we ultimately lost >90% of our userbase. This was understandably the best we could do under short notice with little established contingency plan (i.e. 12 hours of "hey you better grab that discord link, we're going down today") but if other subs are anticipating a ban they have more time to establish their "in case of ban, go here" plan with their userbase. Having a semi-active presence here well before shit hits the fan on reddit would help to retain more users (similar to how t_d was a ghost sub when it got banned due to moving offsite months prior).

  • Users from the subreddit that intends to use a comm here as a lifeboat have no incentive to be here or stay here until their sister comm opens up. (Bad for both growing ChaCha and preserving the number of users from the subreddit.)

Proposal:

  • re-open c/DankLeft but make it comment-only for users until the subreddit is banned and activates lifeboat mode, so to speak

  • introduce a little bot or script that mirrors, e.g., any post from the subreddit that hits 250/500/1k upvotes

This way the post-content is effectively pre-moderated by the subreddit mods without them having to do any work, but the comm here isn't totally dead and the sub users can try slowly acclimating here instead of overwhelming the rest of the site all at once.

If this is something all parties want to go ahead with (i.e. mods/admins here and the DankLeft mod(s)) then I'd be happy to put a bot or script like that together. Based on my playing around with the reddit api in the past I think it should be pretty small and straightforward (unless automated posting to the lemmy is convoluted). I can just run it as a cron job on my computer to start so that there isn't any more of an ops burden on the devs here.

Then if it goes well, we could make this offer to other subreddits that might be concerned about getting banned (especially looking at genzedong here) if they're uneasy about Chapo Culture(tm) to start off with.

Hope this is the right comm for this, since it's more of an administrative thing than a technical thing.