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196 @lemmy.blahaj.zone
SoleInvictus @lemmy.blahaj.zone

Looks like we started a community! Now we need feedback and mods.

I'm kinda regretting not naming it oneninesix, but here we are. I guess I love letters.

To anyone wondering what's up, I did this on my phone while out in the "big city", so I'm still waiting to get home to do anything serious. I have a few ~~suckers really nice people who volunteered for modding along with me. Anyone else who is interested, drop me a line. I'll be picking mods when I get home in a few hours. Sorry for the wait and I'll do my best to put out any fires in the meantime. I didn't think this would take off!~~

For those wondering, here's my take on moderating the place.

  1. Moderation is to facilitate an experience for its users in line with the goals of the community and the instance. It's not to push a personal agenda, give you a bigger hammer in debates, set up a digital fiefdom, etc. You certainly can and should include your mod experience on your dating profile, though. Unilateral decisions are not cool except in a few situations, like if 100% of your userbase is usurped by literal Nazis.
  2. 196 exists to be a place where you post something (often but not always something goofy) when you visit. I know not everyone does and that's fine - I still love you. These things can't be offensive or hurtful, though, especially not intentionally so. Unintentional vs intentional I believe is a HUGE distinction and needs to be considered when moderating.
  3. LBJ LBZ exists as an inclusive, (relatively) judgment-free zone for gender-diverse folks. I intend for us to uphold that here. I say relatively judgment free because there will be people looking to start shit and mods and admins are going to have to judge their actions, but only their actions.

If you wanna be my modder, you gotta get with my bullet points...or argue persuasively why I should amend them (but that part doesn't fit the tune).The three big things I'm looking for otherwise are diverse viewpoints, if you can remain reasonably impartial, and if you can say you're sorry. The last is huge for me. As a mod, you're going to mess up. I used to mod on Reddit and I certainly did! I find it's important for maintaining the community's respect to be able to admit when you made a bad call and what you'll do to avoid it in the future.

@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone, pointers would be welcome as I think you do a great job.

Community feedback is encouraged and welcome, just be aware I'll be a little slow to respond for a bit.

PS: wow, I really DO love letters!

Edit: Corrected point three, damn autocorrect! Believe it or not, we're not an inclusive community in LBJ's corpse.

Update 20/1/25: We're replete with mods for now! Thank you all who reached out. I'll start pulling these stickies as they get irrelevant, I'm just a full disclosure kind of person so I want people to know what is/has been going on.

29 comments

  • One rule I think might be a good idea is that mods aren't allowed to moderate their own posts/comment chains. Not that it's really been an issue on 196 in the past afaik, but there are some communities where the mods will get into an argument with another user and then remove comments for incivility or a similar rule which obviously has massive potential for abuse. Assuming there are enough mods where it's not an issue to do so (which seems very likely based on the number of people interested in moderating) preventing situations like that entirely seems beneficial.

  • The only experience I have is small leadership roles in some discord (🤮) communities, but I’d be willing to try my hand at moderating here. I’m trans, I like to think of myself as a good listener, and while my neurodivergence sometimes makes me “not get the joke” I generally think it forces me take a step back from my emotional response to things and look toward community reaction for guidance on various posts and issues. First and foremost I’m glad this community was made to help us stay on LBZ, and I’d love to help contribute to it even though I’m not a frequent poster.

    I guess I’ll add a strong affinity for privacy, opt-in centric policy, self governance, and mutual accountability, as core tenants of digital communities. Especially in leadership roles I want to hear from my members, and create systems that work for them, not work the way I maybe envision them.

  • I vow to make this comm 1000% more trans and leftist if appointed mod 🤓

    I am in cahoots with the international trans mafia. I will not show anyone any quarter. (I already mod shit on here)

    • The three big things I’m looking for otherwise are diverse viewpoints, if you can remain reasonably impartial

  • The canonical name being written out in words makes sense if you or Ada didn't want to take over the existing community (which IMO would have been preferable). But I would strongly prefer that the display names of both communities make it clear which it is. So !196 would become "196 (archive)" and !onehundredandninetysix should just display "one hundred and ninety six", or at least "196 (new)". This is just so it's very clear at a glance, regardless of where in the UI you're seeing it, which community you're looking at, and helps differentiate it visually from the LW one.

  • You could always just copy the old 196 rules. They work pretty well.

    I wrote these rules for a venting room on the blåhaj matrix, perhaps they could be of some inspiration here. A venting room on a different medium will have very different needs of course from a community like this.

    Rules

    User rules

    • Assume others have good intentions. Strive to keep this a safe space to vent.
    • Tangents are allowed, but the primary purpose of the room is venting.
    • Don't respond to vents if the venter does not wish to be interacted with. You can mark a vent with /dni to signify this.
    • Keep mature vents in 18+ rooms if possible. Use https://trggr.link/ if such rooms are unavailable.
    • Censor/spoiler sensitive issues and provide content warnings as appropriate. https://trggr.link/ is an excellent way to censor something. Some clients support surrounding text in || on either side of it to censor it like this: ||spoilered text||. Some clients may have a spoiler command: /spoiler spoilered text.

    Issues you probably should spoiler: Slurs, racism, ableism, bigotry, suicide, self harm, abuse, drug/alcohol abuse, blood and gore.

    Moderator rules

    • Use a gentle hand, don't reprimand!
    • Assume good intentions.
    • When moderating, use DMs or moderator rooms for anything beyond single-comment moderation and for anything serious.
    • Don't leave moderated users in the dark regarding issues they are directly involved in.
    • Warn, then kick, then temp-ban, then perma-ban (avoid), in that order, when dealing with non-compliant users and serious infractions. Skip steps if necessary for larger infractions.
    • Users may appeal your decisions and some arguing should be tolerated. Attempt to deescalate when this happens. Harassing you however is never okay.
    • If you feel yourself become angry at or get a bad relationship with a user you are moderating then pass on the issue to another mod if they are available.
    • Take care of yourself. You are moderating voluntarily after all.

    Proper guidelines for moderators is probably key, and then for users a quick summary of the purpose of the community is important, followed by any additions to the instance rules.

  • Sorry, but I have to withdraw my offer. I am currently struggling with mental health and can't handle any more toxicity or drama.

    The last few days have shown me that stuff like this is not good for me at all.

    So, good luck and happy rules.

    Hello! It's me, Roflmasterbigpimp! The lovable rascal from communities like !bubatzgartenclub@lemmy.world and, since yesterday, !196@lemmy.world.

    And to some degree even !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone for a whopping two days, until feddit.de (and therefore my account) died.

    Even though I have barely done any moderation at all over at !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone, I still want to help out and perhaps sort things out further. I tried to do my best on the .world 196. I encourage you to check my comment history about this topic and form your own opinion about me.

    I can 100% understand if you decline my offer, but I really like this community and want to make this work.

    Furthermore, I would advise adding a rule along the lines of "All decisions affecting the community and its members as a whole must be backed by a public vote." This is something that could have prevented this whole disaster in the first place.

    • I just saw your update. Sorry you're having a rough time. I hope your struggles lessen and feel free to reach out if you need support. Even if I can't do anything directly, I'll do my best to wrangle up something for you.

    • This is part of the deal you make when joining a community with active mods, admins, and rules. Not everything is up for debate. I know firsthand that this can be quite frustrating sometimes, but we can’t act like everything else has always been subject to election up to this point. It simply was not.

      https://lemmy.world/comment/14556651

      Not sure that really shows you under the best light

    • "All decisions affecting the community and its members as a whole must be backed by a public vote."

      Is there a way on Lemmy to distinguish who is or isn't a community member? Is there a way to prevent me from rigging votes with a bot army or a group of bad actors?

      • I haven't read the response to you quite yet (though skimmed, and saw some cool words I like), but IME, not really/not as well as you might like.

        I know some instances (well, only one I know of - the instance I'm at) have a voting system that hinges around instance membership and declaration by post. It's not perfect, but it gets around the more obvious stuff (bot instances - if you're not a sh.it.head, it doesn't count; admins can refer to unusual patterns in registration around vote time if something seems amiss, etc.)

        But in that case, it's about decisions at an instance level. In this case, it's a little trickier. I don't know if people want the vote to be blahaj users only (though I support that), or if admins are interested in facilitating that/watching for signs of obvious screwiness.

        It's a tricky proposal to ensure it's 100% fair and resistant to manipulation, though I'm sure there's a way to do it. Still think it's important to attempt, though.

      • I've been thinking recently about chain of trust algorithms and decentralized moderation and am considering making a bot that functions a bit like fediseer but designed more for individual users where people can be vouched for by other users. Ideally you end up with a network where trust is generated pseudo automatically based on interactions between users and could have reports be used to gauge whether a post should be removed based on the trust level of the people making the reports vs the person getting reported. It wouldn't necessarily be a perfect system but I feel like there would be a lot of upsides to it, and could hopefully lead to mods/admins only needing to remove the most egregious stuff but anything more borderline could be handled via community consensus. (The main issue is lurkers would get ignored with this, but idk if there's a great way to avoid something like that happening tbh)

        My main issue atm is how to do vouching without it being too annoying for people to keep up with. Not every instance enables downvotes, plus upvote/downvote totals in general aren't necessarily reflective of someone's trustworthiness. I'm thinking maybe it can be based on interactions, where replies to posts/comments can be ranked by a sentiment analysis model and then that positive/negative number can be used? I still don't think that's a perfect solution or anything but it would probably be a decent starting point.

        If trust decays over time as well then it rewards more active members somewhat, and means that it's a lot harder to build up a bot swarm. If you wanted any significant number of accounts you'd have to have them all posting at around the same time which would be a lot more obvious an activity spike.

        Idk, this was a wall of text lol, but it's something I've been considering for a while and whenever this sort of drama pops up it makes me want to work on implementing something.

29 comments